Introduction

AMD's new Radeon HD 5800 Series has been surrounded by a lot of secrecy in the last months because AMD was very careful with providing information to anyone. Once the press had been briefed however this turned to the exact opposite. In the last few weeks not a single day has passed where no new leaked information turned up in some Internet forum. As you probably remember, we had an article collecting all the leaked images, which offered a huge amount of speculative information. But now the NDA is expired and we can provide you with our own pictures and performance data.

Today AMD introduces two new cards: the ATI Radeon HD 5850 and the ATI Radeon HD 5870. A third product, called "ATI Radeon HD 5870 Eyefinity6 Edition" has also been announced but it is simply a HD 5870 with six DisplayPort outputs. If you were drooling to see the HD 5870 X2 launched today, then you'll have to wait a few more months.
All the new cards are based on AMD's "Cypress" graphics processor, which could be described as RV870 equivalent. But (at least for now) AMD has done away with calling their GPUs by the Ryxxx codenames and uses the engineering codenames and the graphics card product names only.

Also check out our other HD 5800 related reviews: AMD Radeon HD 5870 PCI-Express Scaling and AMD Radeon HD 5870 CrossFire

Packaging & Contents

We received a card only, without retail packaging or other accessories.