ATI’s recent launch of the HD5870 and HD 5850 video cards has forced NVIDIA to basically abandon the high-end video card market until the launch of their next generation Fermi architecture in the next couple of months. It has been an interesting launch of which there are currently four cards in ATI’s HD 5 series lineup: HD5870, HD 5850, HD 5770, and HD 5750 with more cards to come. The HD 5850 is based upon ATI’s Evergreen family of chips which include the Cypress XT and Pro (HD 5870 and HD 5850), the Juniper XT and Pro (HD 5770 and HD 5750), the Cedar and the Redwood which are chips scheduled to be released early next year for the low-end and the ultra low-end of the pricing and performance spectrum.
The main feature of the new cards is support for DirectX 11. DirectX 11 brings compliance with Shader Model 5.0, DirectCompute, Compute Shaders, Hull Shaders, Multithreading, and Tessellation to the API space. Tessellation increases the number of visible polygons from a number of control points on a limited model, saving bandwidth over using the high-polygon model by itself. Multi-threaded rendering allows the graphics card to take advantage of multi-core CPUs. Compute Shaders allows the graphics card to be used for non-graphics tasks such as GPGPU, and stream processing.
GIGABYTE uses the reference design almost to a tee with their HD 5850 card. The cooler on the front of the card is the same as on the other HD 5850 cards I’ve reviewed. GIGABYTE has a slightly differently designed cover for the cooler with two cut out silver pieces, but otherwise it’s the same. There is a 47-fin fan on the right side of the card. The GIGABYTE logo on the top and the ATI RADEON logo on the bottom silver piece. The card comes with 1GB of GDDR5 memory clocked at 1GHZ or 4GHz effective. With a 128-bit memory bus interface the HD 5850 has a memory bandwidth of 128GB/second. The I/O bracket contains two Dual-Link DVI connectors, a HDMI connector and a Display Port connector, allowing up to three monitors to be utilized with this card if the DP connector is utilized. The HDMI standard is common for many HDTVs and the DP is the replacement for the DVI connection. You can of course use the connections with different monitors if you use an adapter.
Every ATI HD 5850 card on the market is exactly the same at the moment with differentiators being the Support and the bundle. GIGABYTE has a reference HD 5850 card that performs as well as any other HD 5850 card as the clock speeds and memory clock speeds are the same as the other cards on the market. ZipZoomFly sells this card for $269.99 which is the MSRP suggested by ATI for their HD 5850 cards and GIGABYTE. At the moment they are out of stock as is Newegg making this and the HD 5870 hard cards to get a hold of at the moment. This is still a very Hot Product for the consumer masses.