Introduction

When it came to testing our second HD 5850, we had a clear plan; CrossFire the two bad boys and see what kind of performance we can get. For many the second top model is always the one to get. At launch it's not as expensive as the top model while at the same time still manages to offer some very good performance.

As games advance, you find yourself with a bigger monitor or simply want to crank up the detail even more. Adding a second card of the same model is inexpensive and can quite often yield a very impressive performance increase.

Today with our GIGABYTE and Sapphire HD 5850s in hand we'll find out if CrossFired HD 5850s is something that you should be looking at, not only in the near future, but also today.

We've really got quite a line-up of cards to compare the HD 5850 CrossFire setup against, but the first thing we'll be doing is checking out what GIGABYTE has done with the package before having a closer look at the card itself. Then it's down to the important bit; performance before we wrap it all up in our final thoughts.