It's a salvage part of Cypress (same chip as the Radeon HD 5870), with 1/10 of the chip disabled and the whole thing clocked lower.  It also is given slower memory, and sells at $260 rather than $380.  It also takes only 151 W, less than a Radeon HD 4870 or 4890, much less than a Radeon HD 5870, and dramatically less than a GTX 275 or 285 that pulled well over 200 W.  That leads to a quieter, cooler running card.  It's also physically smaller, so it fits better in cases.

Some highlights from today's reviews:

http://www.anandtech.com/video/showdoc.aspx?i=3650&p=14

"When you take the Cypress based Radeon HD 5870 and cut out 2 SIMDs and 15% of the clock speed to make a Radeon HD 5850, on paper you have a card 23% slower. In practice, that difference is only between 10% and 15% depending on the resolution."

"One thing that’s very clear in these benchmarks is that as things currently stand, the 5850 has made the GTX 285 irrelevant (again). The 5850 is anywhere between 9% and 16% faster depending on the resolution, cheaper by at least $35 as of Tuesday morning (with everything besides a single BFG model going for +$70 or more), and features DirectX11."

"Based on performance alone, from $220 up to the Radeon HD 5870’s price point, the Radeon HD 5850 is going to be the card to get. Meanwhile DirectX 11 is the icing on the cake that offers the 5800 series a greater lifespan and promise of future improvements in games.  For this fall, we're able to say something we haven't been able to say for quite some time: AMD has the high-end market locked up tight."

http://www.tomshardware.com/reviews/radeon-hd-5850,2433-15.html

"Now, with the Radeon HD 5800-series, ATI has two cards that are faster than its competitor’s quickest single-GPU board. My, how times have changed."

"At the outset of this piece, I said we were looking to the Radeon HD 5850 to best Nvidia’s GeForce GTX 285. And I was looking to a pair of 5850s to serve up a sufficient-enough lead over the GeForce GTX 295 to warrant a $20-ish dollar premium. On both counts, that’s exactly what we see."

http://hothardware.com/Articles/AMD-ATI-Radeon-HD-5850-Performance-Review/?page=11

"it is abundantly clear what AMD's goals were with this product--to introduce a more affordable and more economical to produce variant of the Radeon HD 5870, with an identical feature set, at a price point that severely undercuts rival NVIDIA's current flagship single-GPU based card, the GeForce GTX 285. And should Radeon HD 5850 cards hit store shelves at their projected price point of $259 today, as we are told they are supposed to, we'd have to say enthusiastically that AMD has succeeded in this effort."

http://www.legitreviews.com/article/1097/14/

"Since the Radeon HD 5850 PCB is only 9.5" in length and the load temperatures have gone down, the Radeon HD 5850 is something that would work great in a mid-tower system as it should fit and not cook everything else inside the chassis."

"When it comes to the performance of the Radeon HD 5850 we found it to be 15-25% slower than the Radeon HD 5870 in the vast majority of the benchmarks. It was also faster than the NVIDIA GeForce GTX 285 graphics card, which is currently NVIDIA's flagship single GPU video card!"

http://www.guru3d.com/article/radeon-hd-5850-review-crossfire/22

"Price positioning wise the main competitor of the Radeon HD 5850 is obviously the GeForce GTX 285. And though both cards are close to each other in terms of overall performance, the big phat winner here of course is the Radeon HD 5850 thanks to its feature set and price. See, with the 5850 you get to have DirectX 11 support and Eyefinity which are huge selling points. The GTX 285 is priced roughly 50 USD more expensive yet is a DX10 class card."

"We see exemplary performance and great image quality as well. CrossfireX scaling is also very nice, in fact it surprised me a couple of times. You'll quickly gain 1.7x performance in a two-way GPU setup, and that definitely is a lot of performance for the money."

http://www.techreport.com/articles.x/17652/10

"Well, there you have it. The Radeon HD 5850 manages to outshine the fastest single-GPU GeForce card overall while costing less, drawing less power, and producing less noise. We wouldn't be surprised to see Nvidia cut prices in the near future, but in any case, the 5850 is hands-down the second-fastest single-GPU graphics card on the market.

Performance isn't the 5850's only strength, either. AMD's newcomer also brings higher-quality antialiasing and filtering algorithms, as well as next-generation DirectX 11 goodness, so it'll let you enjoy extra eye candy in upcoming games while making old ones look even better. That functionality would be worth a price premium if the 5850 commanded one, but it doesn't—at least not for now."

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And this is also a hard launch.  See New Egg's current availability on the Radeon HD 5870 that launched only a week ago:

http://www.newegg.com/Product/ProductList.aspx?Submit=ENE&DEPA=0&Order=BESTMATCH&Description=5870&x=0&y=0

That's five brands in stock as I post this, and two out of stock.  ZipZoomFly and Tiger Direct also have a mix of brands in stock and out of stock.

The reference cooler is still way too ugly for me.  Also the temps are too high.  I am waiting to see how they modify these in the future.

The new cooler is very quiet, among the quietest stock coolers.

I'd love to get one of these or a 5870 in my new build but I think it would be prudent to wait and see what Nvidia do in response. Nvidia drivers have always been more stable for me in the past (although it has been quite awhile since I had an ATI card so that may have changed by now).

Originally posted by Nizumzen

I'd love to get one of these or a 5870 in my new build but I think it would be prudent to wait and see what Nvidia do in response. Nvidia drivers have always been more stable for me in the past (although it has been quite awhile since I had an ATI card so that may have changed by now).

Nvidia's response won't come anytime soon, and when it finally comes, ati has some new cards out.

Statistics show quite the opposite about drivers, personally I've also had more than enough trouble with my 8800 GTX.

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Originally posted by dfan

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Originally posted by Nizumzen

I'd love to get one of these or a 5870 in my new build but I think it would be prudent to wait and see what Nvidia do in response. Nvidia drivers have always been more stable for me in the past (although it has been quite awhile since I had an ATI card so that may have changed by now).

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Nvidia's response won't come anytime soon, and when it finally comes, ati has some new cards out.
 
Statistics show quite the opposite about drivers, personally I've also had more than enough trouble with my 8800 GTX.

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Fair play. As I said it has been awhile since I owned an ATI card so it might be completely different now but I have not had a single problem with my 8800GT (although I never install beta drivers).

Originally posted by Cleffy

The reference cooler is still way too ugly for me.  Also the temps are too high.  I am waiting to see how they modify these in the future.

Who cares what it looks like as long as it performs.  Im sure a third party will slap a chick pic or some large sword sticker for you to zaz it up.  Temp looks fine to me.

Too high for me.  I am a stickler on temps since high temps can be problamatic.  When you are talking about anything over 75c, its going to have degredation issues.  Quiet != low temps.

Also nVidia did come up with a response: Is better graphics really worth it.  Yes I am serious their response was on a similiar level to questioning the importance of higher performance graphics.  Then touting their nVidia only PhysX and Cuda.

Originally posted by Cleffy

The reference cooler is still way too ugly for me.  Also the temps are too high.  I am waiting to see how they modify these in the future.

I could understand buying a case for aesthetics, or a monitor or keyboard.  But a video card that gets stuck inside a case and disappears?  To each his own, I guess.

If the temperatures on the Radeon HD 5850 are too high for you, then you basically can't get a high end video card at all, and might have trouble finding a mid range card.  Temperatures while running a benchmark like FurMark or OCCT depend heavily on how far the card throttles back performance to avoid frying.  Temperatures while running a game are a better indicator of what will happen in practice.

http://www.techreport.com/articles.x/17652/9

That's a full 14 C (about 25 F) cooler than a GeForce GTX 285.

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PhysX and CUDA may not matter for long, unless there is something already out that uses them that you want.  The Radeon HD 5000 series supports GPU acceleration of Havok, Bullet, and Pixelux physics, which should soon run on any card unless Nvidia suddenly decides that GPU acceleration of physics no longer matters so they're not going to bother supporting anything other than PhysX.  Meanwhile, Nvidia has decided to sabotage PhysX.

http://www.xbitlabs.com/news/video/display/20090929095918_Nvidia_Reportedly_Limits_PhysX_Support_to_Nvidia_Only_Graphics_Sub_Systems.html

If Nvidia's drivers find an ATI video card in your system, they'll disable PhysX even on an Nvidia card.  Before Windows 7, Nvidia had the excuse that Windows could only handle one video card driver, so running an ATI card prevented an Nvidia card from running at all.  Microsoft saw an opportunity to change that to give people another reason to upgrade to Windows 7, so they did.  (Admittedly that's a very small reason, but a thousand very small reasons adds up to a lot of extra people buying the new OS.)  So Nvidia changed their drivers to make it so that even if Windows 7 could run an ATI card for graphics and an Nvidia card for PhysX at the same time, newer Nvidia drivers will break that setup, even though it worked just fine on older Nvidia drivers.

Not that this is a surprise coming from Nvidia.  They also use their drivers to sabotage SLI in any motherboard that doesn't pay them the SLI tax.  And people complain about ATI drivers.

As for CUDA, the Radeon HD 5000 series supports both OpenCL and DirectCompute, which should soon run on any card unless Nvidia also decides that GPGPU doesn't matter anymore.  With both GPGPU and GPU physics, if developers are given a choice between coding something that runs only on Nvidia cards or on both Nvidia cards and ATI cards, which do you think they're going to choose?

I don't know where they got all these numbers, but my computer is liquid cooled.  Right now I'm running at CPU temperature of 58 degrees F and GPU of 66 degrees F with dual 295s.  Of course my liquid cooling helps cooldown both of them further than the built in heat sinks and cooling systems.

I've only ever had 1 computer with ATI video cards and I'll never do it again.  They burned up in about 6 months

If ATI cards are the ones that have problems with frying, then why is Nvidia the company that had to pay out $300 million in the first half of this year for cards that actually fried?  Sure, that was mostly GeForce 8000/9000 series laptop cards, but ATI had no analogous problem with huge warranty payments due to cards frying.

One more review:

http://www.hardocp.com/article/2009/09/30/amds_ati_radeon_hd_5850_video_card_review/8

"If you are waiting for NVIDIA to jump out of the GPU closet with a 5800 killer and put the fear into you for making a 5800 series purchase for Halloween, we suggest paper dragons are not that scary. We feel as though it will be mid-to-late Q1’10 before we see anything pop out of NVIDIA’s sleeve besides its arm. We are seeing rumors of a Q4’09 soft launch of next-gen parts, but no hardware till next year and NVIDIA has given us no reason to believe otherwise."

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Originally posted by Quizzical
If ATI cards are the ones that have problems with frying, then why is Nvidia the company that had to pay out $300 million in the first half of this year for cards that actually fried?  Sure, that was mostly GeForce 8000/9000 series laptop cards, but ATI had no analogous problem with huge warranty payments due to cards frying.
 

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2 of my friends had an 8800GTX and an 8600GT die within a couple weeks of each other, I'm sure it's because of that faulty die packaging material Nvidia had to shell out to cover. Supposed to mostly effect laptops but that was because the theory of laptops frequently heating up to hotter temperatures than a desktop card, then cooling down because of how often they are turned off and on, which stressed the connects more.

Personally I don't place too much stock in how hot one company's GPU runs compared to another when the reading is off the software because the temperature reporting depends very much on the location and quality of the thermal sensor. A GPU actually has hotspots of up to 140C even though the temp sensor only reports 80C, because the temp sensor is rarely able to be in the right spot to read that higher temp and it's those hotspots that are the danger.

If I remember right the raw temp sensor data is used to make a guess at the (higher) real average temperature of the whole die and the raw data is lower than the actual avg temp because the sensor isn't near enough to the hotspots to get an accurate read.