ATI Radeon HD 5850 CrossFire Video Card Review

The Radeon HD 5850

The card that we will be showing you today is the reference Radeon HD 5850, which is a dual-slot graphics card that measures in at 9.5″ in length.

The back of the Radeon HD 5850 is pretty bare and boring as you can see from the image above.

The Radeon HD 5850 does look good and has what looks to be the same factory cooling solution on it that he Radeon HD 5870 has as well. It will be interesting to test and see how well it really does cool.

The Radeon HD 5850 supports ATI CrossFire technology thanks to the interconnects located on the top of the card. On the right motherboard you will be able to run up to four of these graphics cards from CrossFire X. This review will show the performance of a single and dual-GPU setup as we have two reference cards.

The Radeon HD 5850 video card has a pair of dual-link DVI outputs along with DisplayPort and HDMI outputs. All of the hot air from the cooling fan exhausts out the small vent hole on the back of the card and the little slots just in front of the CrossFire interconnects.

The ATI Radeon HD 5850 has two 6-pin PCI-E power connectors on it and both are required for operation. A 500W or larger power supply is recommended by AMD and a list of suggested power supply units can be found here. The air intakes on the end of the card don’t do too much from what we have been told by the AMD engineers (less than 10% of the air intake), but they do add some flare to the card.

The ATI Radeon HD 5870 measures over 11 inches in length, which makes it one of the largest graphics cards that we have ever reviewed. The Radeon HD 5850 PCB measures 9.5″ and is obviously the smaller of the two Radeon 5800 series cards in the image above.