XFX HD 5850 Black Edition comes pre-overclocked and as such will provide about 6% better gaming results than reference HD 5850 cards. If that isn’t enough for you, you can easily push the GPU up to 930MHz, which is maximum possible without voltage changes. Note that maximum possible overclock may vary from card to card.




XFX HD 5850 Black Edition card comes with overclocked GPU and memory. The GPU runs at 765MHz and the 1024MB of GDDR5 runs at 1125MHz.



We presumed that the HD 5850 Black Edition’s GPU is capable of breaking 1GHz and so we used MSI’s Afterburner to push GPU voltages to 1.225V. This allowed 1000MHz clock but the card didn’t run stable. We didn’t go much into making it run stable as 1GHz isn’t recommended for HD 5850 cards with air-cooling.

At 930MHz GPU and 1180MHz memory (4720MHz effectively), the card ran stable at default voltage and auto fan regulation. We managed to score about 12% better on top of already 6% higher results the HD 5850 Black Edition scored versus the reference HD 5850.








XFX HD 5850 Black Edition’s fan was pretty quiet in 2D, and while it got louder in 3D, it’s still not unbearable. We measured about 40°C in idle mode and about 82°C in 3D. After overclocking to 930MHz, the fan didn’t run louder but temperatures climbed up to 89°C. 



The HD 5850 Black Edition consumes up to 24W more than reference when in 3D, but it’s as expected since both the GPU and memory come overclocked.