We recently took a look at Sapphire's HD5750 in this review, and now we're going to see what one of the bigger, faster siblings of the new DirectX 11 capable HD5XXX family has to offer.

The main focus of this review is to feature Sapphire's Radeon HD5850 1GB graphics card, but as an interesting side effect we will also take a look at the CrossFire performance of a pair of these HD5850 cards, as well as a pair of Sapphire's HD5750 cards.

The Radeon HD5850 is based on the new AMD/ATI Cypress GPU, and offers a core clock speed of 725MHz, with 1024MB of 1000MHz (4000MHz effective) GDDR5 memory to boost the performance. The lists below provide more information regarding the features and specifications of this card as taken from the official product page on the Sapphire website.

Features:

» Microsoft DirectX® 11 Support
» ATI Eyefinity Technology
» ATI Stream Technology
   » Designed for DirectCompute 5.0 and OpenCL
   » Accelerate Video Transcoding
» 40 nm Process Technology
» Advanced GDDR5 Memory Technology
» 2nd Generation TeraScale Engine
» Microsoft Windows 7® Support
» ATI CrossFireX™ Technology
» Enhanced Anisotropic Filtering
» Accelerated Video Transcoding
» Display Flexibility, Supports DL-DVI, DP, HDMI and D-Sub
» HDMI 1.3
» Dolby® TrueHD and DTS-HD Master Audio™ Support
» ATI PowerPlay™ Technology – Enhanced Support for GDDR5 memory
» ATI Avivo™ Technology Enhanced Unified Video Decoder 2 (UVD 2)
» Supports OpenGL 3.1

Specifications:

» SKU Number: 21162-00-50R
» I/O Output: Dual DL-DVI-I+DP+HDMI, Triple Display Support
» Core Clock: 725 MHz
» Memory Clock: Effective 4000 MHz
» PCI Express 2.0 x16 bus interface
» 1024MB /256bit GDDR5 memory interface
» Dual Slot Cooler with Auto Fan Control, 2 Ball Bearing
» On-board HDMI, supports HDMI 1.3 with High Bitrate Audio
» On-board DisplayPort
» Dirt2 Coupon In the Box