Video Card

It doesn't come as any surprise that the HD 5850 from GIGABYTE carries with it the same overall design as the other HD 5850 we've looked at, which really is the same design as the HD 5870. GIGABYTE has of course spiced the card up in their own way by adding some stickers.

We can see one sticker is placed on the fan to let us know the brand while the rest of the cooler is stickered with a grey, black and red setup which again lets us know the brand along with the model. There isn't anything too fancy going on at the moment, but that's to be expected so close to launch.

One of the main differences in the overall design of the card is where the little vent area is at the back of the card. Instead of being empty we see the HD 5850 carries with it the power connectors; in this case we can see two 6-Pin PCI Express connectors.

Having a look at the front we see our two standard CrossFire connectors. Fortunately we're going to be making use of them today which is always great news.

The I/O department carries with it the same setup we saw on our other HD 5850 and our other HD 5870s. We've got a vent and a Dual-Link DVI connector on the top half while another Dual-Link DVI connector along with a DisplayPort and HDMI connector nestles in the bottom half.

Specifications

Again, being a reference model there isn't any surprises when it comes to the clocks of the card with the default ones being seen. That means the core comes in at 725MHz while the 1GB of GDDR5 memory carries with it a 4000MHz QDR clock.

One of the main areas we want to pay attention to here is the ATI CrossFire section at the bottom and as you can see, our 2 GPUs are enabled.