Customer Reviews

Diamond ATI Radeon HD5850 PCIE 1024 MB GDDR5 Video Card 5850PE51G

5 star:		(9)
4 star:		(2)
3 star:		(1)
2 star:		(3)
1 star:		(2)

 

 

Wow great cards, bought two of these for eyefinity and crossfire. With the latest catalyst driver it shows that crossfire is enabled in windows 7. Looks like I got them at the right time before the price increase.
Run everything at max settings World at war looks great, and they are almost silent. Great cards I would recomend to anyone.

I replaced my ATI Radeon 4850HD with this 5850. Great improvement in the games I play (Battlefield 2: Bad Company, Fallout 3). I am finally able to game in full 1920x1200 resolution!
The price here on Amazon was in-line with Newegg, and actually less when I factored in shipping (Prime). The entire Radeon 5000 line is priced above retail everywhere right now anyway, but Amazon was closer than most.
Windows 7 Home Premium 64-bit using Catalyst 10.2 would not give me a rating on the video. I updated to the beta 10.3 drivers and it scored 7.6 out of 7.9 on graphics. The 4850 was 7.3. Doesn't sound like much, but, like I said, the improvement was enough to take me from 1280x720 to 1920x1200. This was also due in part to the increase of RAM from 512MB GDDR3 on the 4850 to 1024MB GDDR5 on the 5850.
Even with possible competition from Nvidia coming this year (Fermi), I am very happy with this purchase. The price is not anticipated to drop more than $30 to $50 when Fermi hits anyway. As of today, Fermi will be shipping with fewer cores than anticipated (480 vs 512), so that launch may not have any impact on the Radeon 5000 line anyway.
The power draw on this is less than the 4850 as well. I have a PC Power & Cooling 750 PSU and it is plenty.
So, great card, good deal. You'll love it if you get it!

I am running an older Intel Quad-Core, Core 2 Duo @ 2.4GHz, with 4GB DDR2 RAM, and dual 150GB Raptors in RAID.

After a couple of weeks of running this on Modern Warfare 2, Battlefield Bad Company 2, Left for Dead - both, and Star Trek Online, the card has worked great. It's fast and stays cool and doesn't get too hot or noisy.

I did have to get a larger power supply to handle the card, but they're cheap and easy to install. The card however does take up the size of two slots on the motherboard and I had a couple of transistors/something that stuck out and wouldn't let the card seat properly. Luckily the card's shroud had vents in that area and after snipping a few to open it up, the card finally fit. Then the tubes sticking out the side interfered with the placement of my second hard drive and it had to be moved. This was placed in a Dell Inspiron 530, a great desktop, but it's smaller form factor made it difficult to get the card in, so it wasn't the cards fault. So far I'm happy with the card!

As with most 5850s, this thing spits out plenty of pixels and consumes very little power, particularly at idle. Unfortunately, you have to put up with ATI drivers to get it. (As of right now, Catalyst 10.7 causes the video subsytem to crash under Win7 x64 for many people, recommend using 10.5 until this gets fixed.)

Overall, I'm willing to put up with ATI's driver problems because the performance to power consumption ratio is really amazing on this card (at least according to the usual review sites), and I can run Star Trek Online at near max settings even though I'm using a 1920x1080 monitor. (Side note: never enable Dynamic Lighting in STO if you use an ATI card.)

My main beef is with the physical card itself. One day, Diamond will make a card that fits in the slot and screws in without a lot of grunting, bending, sweating, and swearing. I should've learned my lesson from my previous Diamond cards. Well, you know what they say: fool me once, shame on you; fool me... can't get fooled again!

Dear Diamond, I will buy your engineers a ruler. I'll give it to them for free. Just tell me what address to mail it to. Please don't lose it.

Like the title says. Bought this card and after 3 months it died. Was suspicious when it arrived and right away I noticed it made a lot of noise from the fan. Tried calling Diamond customer service several times, kept waiting on hold. Never got a customer service rep to answer. Left a ticket (e-mail with customer service) on thier web site. No one ever read it. It's been a couple of months now. I ended up getting a partial refund from Amazon.com. Thank God for that. Anywhere else and I would have gotten nothing. All in all I will never buy from Diamond ever again. For what it's worth while it did run it was impressivly fast. If your going to buy a ATI card, stick with a better company like XFX or Asus. Stay away from Diamond. Oh by the way, Diamond must have realized they made a bad card because it has since been redesigned. Look it up on [...].

This is such an awesome card! I bought to build my first gaming PC. It runs like a dream. I have tried Mass Effect 2, Bioshock 2, Street Fighter IV and Dragon Age Origins. It runs them all at the highest possible settings, no sweat. The catalyst drivers have an auto tune option that will overclock it for you. You can also overclock it yourself with that software or download something else from the internet to reach 5870 settings. I have a phenom II X4 955 BE CPU, MSI 790FX-GD70 motherboard, Corsair 2x2Gb 1333Mhz RAM, WD 1TB Hard Drive, Cooler Master Silent Pro PSU, HAF 922 case. I'm thinking about getting a second card when the price drops, but it looks like it won't be anytime soon.

Works!!

If the latest drivers you download from ATI causes problems. Use the CD provided.
Tested in Windows 7 64 bit and XP 32 bit. No issues.

Crysis runs at 33 fps avg in full enthusiast setting.

Other thoughts

2.66 core i7920
6 GB OCZ Gold RAM DDR3
this card.
Asus VK246 24" display

This Card can't be beat for the money. Runs every game I have tried at 60fps with AA cranked up at 1080p. buy this card!

The product is great, hasn't given me any trouble yet. I haven't seen any issues with dual monitors, even when gaming on one with video in the other. I've seen reviews talking about a high pitched whine, but I personally have not experienced this. It's fair to note I have a powerhouse processor and a very good cooling unit, so I'm not a good benchmark. The registration process is annoying, because it gives you the wrong website if you click "register" in the auto-play of the disc. Just google the product with registration.

If you are buying the card based on the pictures, it's not what you get, it's a card with a cheap plastic cover. It looks nothing like the item pictured and it also does not have a picture on it.