News - AMD ATI Radeon HD 5850: post-launch pricing comparison

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AMD announced its Radeon HD 5850 some two weeks ago, but stock proved to be non-existent. Has the situation improved?

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Not that far away from a paper launch. It would have been better for AMD to wait until they had a decent supply in the channel before launching. It's a shame because AMD have been pretty good with launch availability in the recent past.

Waiting for the Asus version to come out...

The Asus 5870 is modified to allow easier overvolting. If you read the review of the 5870 at anandtech it explains that the card auto down volts to avoid the VRMs overheating and damaging the card when pushed extremely hard (usually by stress benchmarks like furmark). The flip side of mechanism is that it's extremely difficult to overclock the card. Asus have obviously found a way to get round that which might make it possible to extract a lot more performance (value) from the cards (if I understand it all correctly) and I reckon that could be an even bigger deal on the 5850... :)

Wonder if Sapphire is going to do the only 5850x2. I might wait a see on this before I commit to buy.

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Originally Posted by bradyjames

Not that far away from a paper launch. It would have been better for AMD to wait until they had a decent supply in the channel before launching. It's a shame because AMD have been pretty good with launch availability in the recent past.

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It's actually quite far away from a paper launch. The difference is supply and demand. The Radeon HD 5850 is 32% less expensive than the Radeon HD 5870 yet only varies 15-20% at most in performance and at the same time outperforms any current single GPU nVIDIA solution that is higher priced. Because of that it is in HIGH demand - maybe higher than normal.

The supply is there. You just have to be patient. I went looking for a Radeon HD 5850 at NewEgg on Monday. Saw a Gigabyte HD 5850 come in stock Monday night, didn't bother to order because I don't like Gigabyte as a company. It was soon out of stock within 60 minutes. The next day the MSI version arrived in stock and I ordered one. Within 30 minutes it was sold out. My brand new video card is arriving today.

So it's not that they aren't in stock IMO. I believe they are just in a higher demand than normal and selling out quickly. Throughout this week Radeon HD 5850 cards have came in stock and sold out at NewEgg.

Come on guys, seriously is it THAT hard to pick up a phone. I'll give you a hint, overclockers, scan, novatech, dabs, ebuyer, specialtech, microdirectaria, etc, etc, etc.

they all have phone numbers on their websites, and I dare say a call to them, and some uk based distributors would tell you almost exactly how many cards they've had in, should you wish to ask.

Rather than announce poor availability and no cards, you could ask and know, that might even count as journalism.

Its fairly simple, if you followed the OCUK stock threads, I would guesstimate anything from 700-1000 cards went out. Also, didn't the 5850 official launch only last wednesday or thursday, with stock available in plenty of places from tuesday, with thousands of cards shipped in the UK alone?

What is a good number, what counts as real, being pre-order doesn't mean theres no availability at all and whats more, you know it.

Every store you listed could have had 300,000,000 cards in every single day of the week, sold all of them, and they'd still be out of stock, but you'd hardly call it bad availability.

THeres a higher demand for a very similarly performing card at 33% less in cost. Demand is higher, pre-orders are higher than on the 5870, every store around is getting stock, almost daily, and filling pre-orders by the hundreds.

But again I'll point out, 10 minutes on the phone could have probably got you two numbers, rough average of cards sold to date, and probably a very decent estimate of stock due in next week.

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Originally Posted by Noli

Waiting for the Asus version to come out...

The Asus 5870 is modified to allow easier overvolting. If you read the review of the 5870 at anandtech it explains that the card auto down volts to avoid the VRMs overheating and damaging the card when pushed extremely hard (usually by stress benchmarks like furmark). The flip side of mechanism is that it's extremely difficult to overclock the card. Asus have obviously found a way to get round that which might make it possible to extract a lot more performance (value) from the cards (if I understand it all correctly) and I reckon that could be an even bigger deal on the 5850... :)

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All 5870/50/770/750's have the overheating protection, its nothing to do with Asus, infact Asus ones for right this second are identical in every last single way to every other card. The only difference is their voltage application to allow easier overclocking, not harder. You can use the same software on any current 5870 flashed with a asus bios, or an almost identical app from MSI that works on any 5870 right now full stop. The same utility will soon work on any 5850 also, allowing software voltage adjustment which so far seems like you'll see anything from 900-1050Mhz, with stock cooling, with software over volting thats easy to use.

The only difficulty in overclocking is memory downclocks rather than "fails" or crashes, or at the very least should do in most situations. So its harder to tell when you've gone to far, but not very hard at all. Test your overclock settings, using whatever you want, 3dmark will do, overclock till you get a performance drop, performance drop = clocked too far, back off till you find your top performance and bobs your uncle. Considering the cards aren't bandwidth starved, its not particularly useful to get every last Mhz out of the memory anyway, core clocks are infinately more important.

EDIT:- I would say to 12gauge aswell, whatever you aversion to Gigabyte they are one of the only, if not the only gfx card maker(5870/50 at least) to offer a 3 year warranty. The rest are mostly 2 year warrantys, a couple only one year. Had lots of gigabyte boards, only ones failed and I got a prompt RMA, obviously every company has good and bad situations with RMA's and delays, and great RMA's against the norm aswell. Had the gigabyte's come in stock I would have got one for the warranty value over other brands with identical cards/packages.

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Originally Posted by drunkenmaster

I would say to 12gauge aswell, whatever you aversion to Gigabyte they are one of the only, if not the only gfx card maker(5870/50 at least) to offer a 3 year warranty. The rest are mostly 2 year warrantys, a couple only one year. Had lots of gigabyte boards, only ones failed and I got a prompt RMA, obviously every company has good and bad situations with RMA's and delays, and great RMA's against the norm aswell. Had the gigabyte's come in stock I would have got one for the warranty value over other brands with identical cards/packages.

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Er, my MSI Radeon HD 5850 has a 3 year warranty. They have a 3 year warranty on ALL of their VGA products. Asus has a 3 year warranty on ALL VGA products as well.

Visiontek has a Lifetime warranty on all of their ATi powered graphics cards. XFX has a Lifetime warranty as long as you register within 30 days of purchase.

Sapphire, Diamond, HIS and PowerColor all have 2 year warranty.

I could not find any 1 year warranty only for any Radeon HD 5850 brand.

Lambda-tek Sapphires are very low in price compared to everywhere else (£184) and they had a few in on Thursday but they'd all gone before I got chance to order. Scan had some of the XFX 1s in on Friday so I ordered 1 albeit annoyingly at nearly £30 more but I didn't want to wait.