According to industry sources, ATI's HD 5850 is apparently being delayed and the production should start this week. This means that retail/e-tail will see it sometime in early October, probably during the first week.

Apparently, the story behind this delay is that all available GPUs went for the HD 5870, but we are quite sure that a lot of consumers are waiting for the HD 5850 as well. This is the mainstream card that has a sweet US $259 price tag, something that is quite less than the mentioned US $379.99 price tag for the HD 5870. The price difference in Europe is just as staggering, you'll pay €329 for an HD 5870, while and HD 5850 should cost you €229.

The HD 5850 works at 725MHz for the core and comes with 1GB of GDDR5 memory clocked at 1000MHz. These cards might be able to narrow the gap once partners come up with their own overclocked version with non-reference coolers.