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HIS Radeon HD 5850 Review
[Abstract]
Weaker, but CheaperThe graphics war is looking more and more one-sided these days as ATI continues to pour out its latest Evergreen (Radeon 5000) series of cards. Just weeks after the range-top...
[Content] PCDigitalMobileGame
Temperature
Given the lower specifications of the Radeon HD 5850, it was not surprising that it was slightly cooler than the Radeon HD 5870. Clocking in at a moderate 74 degrees Celsius, we expect temperatures to go further south once vendors start rolling out HD 5850 with custom coolers. Also, the HD 5850 was also cooler than all of NVIDIA's GT 200 class cards except the GeForce GTX 260+.
Power Consumption
Power consumption figures were in line with our expectations too. Following the trend set by the new Evergreen cards, the Radeon HD 5850 recorded extremely low idle readings. At load, it was comparable with NVIDIA's GeForce GTX 260+. Once again, ATI has succeeded in a chip that gives an excellent performance to watt ratio.
Overclocking
The Radeon HD 5850 seemed to be a willing overclocker. Using ATI's Overdrive utility, we managed to push the HD 5850 to the maximum that ATI would allow us - 775MHz at the core and 4500MHz DDR at the memory. This represents a modest 50MHz bump at the core and 500MHz DDR at the memory. Despite the minor increase in clock speeds, we got 7005 3DMarks on the Vantage's Extreme preset, a respectable improvement of 5%.
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