Finally today, AMD has decided to let loose the review hounds on the HD 5850 and bunch of reviews are already online. Reviews mostly agree that the HD 5850 is a great card priced just right. The HD 5870 might be the fastest single GPU card on the market, but HD 5850 is certainly a value alternative, at least once it becomes available.

The bottom line is that the HD 5850 has made Nvidia's GTX 285 irrelevant. It can fit inside the smaller cases, it's faster than GTX 285, and when compared to the more expensive HD 5870 card, its cooler, quieter and of course less power hungry. The big advantage over the GTX 285, beside the lower price and higher performance is the future proof DirectX 11, if you care that is.



Priced at US $289, or somewhere around €200 in Europe, the HD 5850 can be considered a best buy, considering the performance and the price. Unfortunately, the availability, or to be precise, low availability due to high demand, that plagues the HD 5870 will probably hit the HD 5850 as well, and according to our info, the cards should become available in the first days of next month, at least some of them.

Here is the full list of reviews that has gone online and we will add some more once they start to appear.

- AnandTech
- Guru3D
- PCPerspective
- The TechReport
- HotHardware