XFX 5850

Not a bad chunk of card from XFX.

Graphics cards don't really change too much; you've either got an ultra-high-end-beast that looks never to be beaten (give it a few months and think again), or you've got something a little bit more reasonable. The 5850 is almost in the latter, being affordable enough at $400 without being overly expensive. It's a bridge that joins the two camps, an in-between solution that blurs the line between each side and gives some pretty tempting features too.

The most tempting, as with any card, is the graphics core. Itself a chip manufactured on a 40nm process (the smallest commercial high-volume size made today), it boasts over a billion transistors that make up a total of 1440 shader units. Each shader unit is a relatively simple processor that works almost like a worker bee in a hive, buzzing away as a collective entity to achieve a pretty huge result. It's running at stock clock speeds, with no factory overclock applied. There's also 1GB of GDDR5 memory onboard that is running through a 256-bit memory interface, but we've found that even that much bandwidth available can be enough to starve the shader units in some circumstances.

Physically the card is pretty darn showy, with a big sticker applied to the front face of the card that meshes decently with the black and red superautomotive styling. The plastic shell is meant to channel airflow that is sucked in by the squirrel-cage fan at the end, mostly exhausting it outside the case (though some slips past the twin Crossfire nipples within the case). Display outputs boggle the mind with two DVI, one HDMI and one DisplayPort, and up to three of them can be used at any one time for a phenomenal amount of screen real estate. Not shown in the picture are the two 6-pin PCIe power connectors that reside in a small lip at the end of the card, providing all the delicious electricity that this card craves.

While this is just a reference heatsink, it's not a bad performer. Temperatures at idle sat at a cool 44 degrees, hitting a load of 66 degrees. The fan was quieter than a mouse in marshmallow slippers while idling at 51.8dBA, though at load this increased into a mouse-devouring feline yowl to generate 61.5dBA. More or less forgivable, but we'd still prefer a quieter design. All things considered this design is more than enough for some overclocking, and we managed to bump up the core speed an extra 21 per cent to 880MHz, while the memory made an impressive 20 per cent increase to 1200MHz. Oddly it seemed to be relatively sturdy when pushed past this stable limit, however a persistent graphical error glitch appeared on the card if memory was clocked past 1200MHz - even if it was returned to the original clockspeed without a restart.

Performance under our new testing regime was very nice, with Crysis very playable at the huge resolution we test at, and GRID also providing plenty of performance. Both 3DMark06 and 3DMark Vantage show performance improvements over last month's 5850 offerings, a sign that ATI/AMD's driver team are making some serious progress. This card is more than enough for some high-res gaming, and to top it all off there's an included steam voucher for DiRT 2, the first DX11 game to be released on PC.

However, while the XFX card has a nice bundle and performance, it is ever so slightly more expensive than the competition that has included the same game. If you need a well-performing card for a decent price, this is worth checking out.