Sapphire Radeon HD 5850 Xtreme 1GB Graphics Card Review

Final ThoughtsThe point behind this review wasn’t to show what the 5850 is all about as we already know that and are all aware as to what it looks like, what technology is involved and so forth. The point behind it was to show if it can still keep up with today’s standards of graphics cards.

I think we can safely say that the card accomplished that nicely by giving very similar results and sometimes getting better results than the 6870 overclocked cards on offer. Some tests even saw a peak in performance that surpassed the 6950.

When looking at pricing and mainly pricing comparison, the 5850 comes in at around the £100 mark, and a 6870 at around £130 upwards, and finally with a 6950 at anywhere from £170 upwards. This shows that the 5850 Xtreme is fantastic value for money based of how it compares with this new fangled cards that are said to offer unrivalled performance. Well the 5850 Xtreme certainly rivalled it to say the least.

I have to be honest, the 5850 Xtreme has surpassed my expectations as I wasn’t expecting it to hit figures anywhere close to the 6950 but it shows that Sapphire definitely know what they’re doing and whatever they are doing, they should keep it up as it’s saving people hundreds of hard earned pounds whilst enabling their machines to play some of the latest and greatest games on their top performance settings. Keep it up Sapphire!

Pros:

• Fantastic value for money
• Nice mixture of display connections
• Rivals graphics cards worth almost double the price
• Quiet cooler
• Efficient running

Cons:

• None that we can see