XFX Radeon HD 5850 1GB GDDR5 Review

Heat & Acoustics

For all temperature testing, the cards were placed on an open test bench with a single 120mm 1200RPM fan placed ~8” away from the heatsink. The ambient temperature was kept at a constant 22°C (+/- 0.5°C). If the ambient temperatures rose above 23°C at any time throughout the test, all benchmarking was stopped. For this test we use the 3DMark Batch Size test at it highest triangle count with 4xAA and 16xAF enabled and looped it for one hour to determine the peak load temperature as measured by GPU-Z.

For Idle tests, we let the system idle at the Vista desktop for 15 minutes and recorded the peak temperature.


Just like the HD 5870, the HD 5850 is for the most part utterly quiet as its cooler goes about its job of cooling the 40nm core. There are a few instances where the fan spins up to about 40% of its maximum rotational speed but even then its noise output stays at a muted hum. Interestingly, this lethargic fan speed profile doesn’t translate into high temperatures even under high load situations.

Power Consumption

For this test we hooked up our power supply to a UPM power meter that will log the power consumption of the whole system twice every second. In order to stress the GPU as much as possible we once again use the Batch Render test in 3DMark06 and let it run for 30 minutes to determine the peak power consumption while letting the card sit at a stable Windows desktop for 30 minutes to determine the peak idle power consumption. We have also included several other tests as well. Please note that after extensive testing, we have found that simply plugging in a power meter to a wall outlet or UPS will NOT give you accurate power consumption numbers due to slight changes in the input voltage. Thus we use a Tripp-Lite 1800W line conditioner between the 120V outlet and the power meter.


Power consumption is one area where ATI’s new series of cards really shines and the HD 5850 is no exception. Our card showed about 2W higher idle than the HD 5870 but this is well within the margin of error as ATI states both cards have an identical 27W of idle power consumption.

Full load efficiency is exceptional to say the least considering the HD 5850 sucks down nearly 50W less than a GTX 285 and 15W less than a GTX 275 but is able to blow both NVIDIA cards out of the water performance-wise.