Introduction

About three months ago AMD released their new Radeon HD 5800 Series of graphics cards which quickly became a big success due to the numerous improvements made over previous generations. Up to now all cards available from all manufacturers were reference design cards which means they were all made to the same specifications, using the same components and then a sticker was added on the cooler depending on the AIB.

Now Powercolor is one of the first AIBs to release a custom HD 5850 designed card that uses both a non-reference cooler and a non-reference PCB design. While this allows for considerable production optimizations and reduce manufacturing cost it also introduces the risk that the product might not work as optimally as intended by AMD.

Powercolor is actually going beyond the reference design specs and offers higher clock speeds of 760 / 1050 vs. 725 / 1000 on the normal cards. While not making a huge difference it should still give a little extra performance boost to the card.