Nowadays Sapphire has equipped its HD5000 series (40nm) with the so called Vapor-X cooling technology for the diehard gamers, with an overclocked GPU core @765MHz and the GDDR5 Memory is clocked @1125MHz.

This card also speeds up older DirectX10 and DirectX9 games with improved details because of tessalation, enhanced transparency and lighting effects in DX11 titles.

Sapphire has has placed a custom designed three heat-pipe heatsink, which is rather quiet, with an 11 blade cooling fan on the GPU core that makes 'factory overclocking' possible. Because of the DisplayPort you can run ATI's Eyefinity, a multiple monitor 'experience', a power supply of 600 Watts is recommended by the manufacturer.

Overclocing: You'll have to keep in mind that the Sapphire 5850 has allready been OCed to 765MHz(GPU) and 1125MHz(memory), so the headroom is probaly limited.The reviewers tried to further overclock it with two (free) tools, the AMD GPU Clock tool and MSI AfterBurner. After using these tools the final stable results for the GPU was 901MHz (+20%) and for the memory clock it was 1200MHz (+24%).

Conclusion: With a relatively 'silent' cooler and very good overclocking results the reviewers were 'impressed'. A downside is perhaps the fact that it is a is a somewhat longer than the reference card. You'll pay probably something like 30% more than the cheapest version of the 5850 that goes into the direction of the 5870 that with more stream processors, texture units and the reference speed is a lot faster. Nevertheless this is probably the fastest 5850 on the market.

Benchmarks: Batman: Arkham Asylum, Resident Evil 5, Tom Clancy's H.A.W.X., 3DMark Vantage, Unigine 'Heaven' DX11, S.T.A.L.K.E.R.: Call of Pripyat, Temperature Testing, Power Consumption.