AMD’s Radeon HD 5850: The Other Shoe Drops
by Ryan Smith on September 30, 2009 12:00 AM EST- Posted in
- GPUs
World of Warcraft
Blizzard’s genre-dominating MMO is our next benchmark. As WoW is known to be CPU limited, we can turn it up to rather silly settings and still get a playable framerate on just about anything.
For whatever reason the 5800 series cards do particularly well here. Even the 5850 can completely decimate the GTX 285, both in single card and Crossfire/SLI configurations. You can see the CPU limitations in this game come to light, as at the very top the 5870 and 5850 are nearly tied.
Facebook
Twitter
RSS
95 Comments
View All Comments
bigboxes - Wednesday, September 30, 2009 - link
Well, you meant YOUR HTPC case. Not all HTPCs are limited to half-cards. Although, I thik that these fan blower cooling solutions are horrible for HTPC applications with their horrible whine. It may be awhile until aftermarket solutions are out for this new line.NA1NSXR - Wednesday, September 30, 2009 - link
...thats what he said.gigahertz20 - Wednesday, September 30, 2009 - link
I'm surprised it performs so closely with the 5870 yet cooler running and doesn't demand so much from your power supply. I think this is my next card come Christmas time, unless Nvidia releases some details about their next generation GPU's along with expected prices before then.I've read rumors that we will not see any Nvidia cards for sale until next year...ouch, but I'm betting they release before Christmas. Missing the holiday buying season would be a real stupid move for Nvidia.
melgross - Wednesday, September 30, 2009 - link
It isn't a matter of stupid. It's a matter of what they can do. If they can do it, we know they will, but if they can't, well, that's a problem.blanarahul - Wednesday, December 21, 2011 - link
These younger brothers of the fastest parts are always great.GTX 570, 470, 260, 8800 GTS all were superb value cards with high performance!