The Radeon HD 5850 was a performance-segment graphics card by ATI, launched on September 30th, 2009. Built on the 40 nm process, and based on the Cypress graphics processor, in its Cypress PRO variant, the card supports DirectX 11.2. The Cypress graphics processor is a large chip with a die area of 334 mm² and 2,154 million transistors. Unlike the fully unlocked Radeon HD 5870, which uses the same GPU but has all 1600 shaders enabled, ATI has disabled some shading units on the Radeon HD 5850 to reach the product's target shader count. It features 1440 shading units, 72 texture mapping units, and 32 ROPs. ATI has paired 1,024 MB GDDR5 memory with the Radeon HD 5850, which are connected using a 256-bit memory interface. The GPU is operating at a frequency of 725 MHz, memory is running at 1000 MHz (4 Gbps effective).
Being a dual-slot card, the ATI Radeon HD 5850 draws power from 2x 6-pin power connectors, with power draw rated at 151 W maximum. Display outputs include: 2x DVI, 1x HDMI 1.3a, 1x DisplayPort 1.1. Radeon HD 5850 is connected to the rest of the system using a PCI-Express 2.0 x16 interface. The card's dimensions are 241 mm x 111 mm x 37 mm, and it features a dual-slot cooling solution. Its price at launch was 299 US Dollars.