PowerColor Radeon HD 5850: Worth the Wait

For PC gamers one of the biggest stories of 2009 was the launch of the Radeon HD 5000 series, most notably the higher-end HD 5870 and 5850. They received rave reviews, extolling their high levels of performance and excellent energy efficiency. As a result, they became massively popular and created a demand with which ATI/AMD was unable to cope. Their initial production runs had very poor yields, the same problem that plagued the release of their first 40nm GPU, the HD 4770. Cards trickled in slowly to distributors for most of the last quarter and the stock that did become available in stores were quickly gobbled up. The predicament was exacerbated by the allocation of a significant portion of 40nm chips for the release of the dual GPU HD 5970.