The suffix ‘Black Edition’ suggests that this variant of the Radeon HD 5850 by XFX is factory-overclocked. The core and memory aren’t supercharged, but they run slightly faster than their stock speeds. The core runs 5.5 percent faster at 765 MHz and the memory is clocked 125 MHz higher than the stock speed at 1125 MHz.
The card sports AMD’s reference design and standard cooler, which is good enough to handle the additional heat. The cooler is about the length of the card, with a fan at the end that draws air in from the top and cools the heatsink within the chamber. Hot air is blown out from the vents at the rear and side of the card. The heatsink has copper heat pipes running through it for efficient and uniform dissipation of heat from the GPU to the fins. The card draws power from a pair of 6-pin PCIe power connectors at the end. With support for AMD Eyefinity multiple display technology the XFXRadeon HD 5850 Black Edition supports triple monitor setups for which it has three digital outputs on the rear panel—DVI, HDMI and DisplayPort.
Test rig
CPU: AMD Phenom X4 965 Black Edition
Motherboard: Gigabyte 890FXA-UD7
RAM: 2x 2 GB Corsair XMS3 DDR3-1600
Hard disk: Intel X25-M SSD, 80 GB
Power supply: Tagan BZ 1300
Operating system: Windows 7
ATI Catalyst Control Center: Version 10.3
