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The ATi Radeon HD 5870 was the first and fastest DirectX 11 graphics card, followed 15 years ago just a week later Testing the Radeon HD 5850which represented the affordable entry into the world of DirectX 11 graphics cards.
RV870 with 40 nm and DirectX 11
Like the Radeon HD 5870, the HD 5850 also relied on the RV870 chip in the new 40 nm production with 2.15 billion transistors. Compared to its bigger brother, both the clock speeds of 725 MHz instead of 850 MHz and the expansion level of the chip were lower with 288 instead of 320 shader units and 72 instead of the previous 80 texture units. At 2,000 instead of 2,400 MHz, the 1,024 MB GDDR5 memory also ran a little slower than in the Radeon HD 5870. Otherwise, the ATi Radeon HD 5850 supported all the features that were also offered by the Radeon HD 5870 – including DirectX 11, of course.
Visually, the Radeon HD 5850 was identical to its bigger brother, apart from the slightly smaller dimensions. The PCB was slightly shorter at 24 instead of 28 cm, but the two 6-pin PCIe connectors were moved to the end of the graphics card. Like the Radeon HD 5870, the cooler relied on a 70 mm radial fan that supplied fresh air. There was a copper cooling block on the GPU itself, which then transferred the waste heat to aluminum fins.
Faster than a GeForce GTX 285
Despite the stripped-down specifications of the Radeon HD 5850, it cut an excellent figure in the benchmarks. It was able to beat the competition’s fastest single-GPU graphics card, the GeForce GTX 285, by an average of between one and nine percent. The fastest graphics card from the previous generation from the company was also outperformed by up to 35 percent. The HD 5850 lacked around 17 to 21 percent performance compared to the faster Radeon HD 5870.
As expected, the B grades of the Radeon HD 5850 behaved similarly to the Radeon HD 5870. In practice, this meant that the volume was very pleasant when idle, but annoying under load. Given the high gaming performance, the power consumption was very good even under load, while the temperatures were consistently in the green range. If you wanted to get a little more performance from the Radeon HD 5850, you could expect around 13 percent more through overclocking – at higher clock speeds, the first crashes appeared in the test.
Conclusion
The biggest highlight of the Radeon HD 5850 was the price. At around 220 euros, it was priced much more attractively than the Radeon HD 5870, which was priced at around 330 euros. For example, it was almost 55 euros cheaper than the GeForce GTX 285 and at the same time faster. The main point of criticism was the relatively high volume under load.
In the “In the test 15 years ago” category, the editorial team has been taking a look at the test archive every Saturday since July 2017. We list the last 20 articles that appeared in this series below:
Even more content of this kind and many other reports and anecdotes can be found in the Retro corner in the ComputerBase forum.
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