“This article proves you can easily pair a Radeon HD 5870 with a Radeon HD 5850 and run them together in mixed CrossFire for improved gaming performance over a single card solution. That in itself is a small victory and a nice feature to have if you have a chance to mix and match cards like this for a performance upgrade down the road. One thing that shocked me was that the CrossFire gaming performance of a Radeon HD 5870 + 5850 was lower than that of a pair of Radeon HD 5850 video cards in CrossFire in all of our testing with the exception of one game. I would assume it is because the higher capacity card (the Radeon HD 5870) gets brought down to the lower one (the Raeon HD 5850) plus some overhead…”Here are some more Graphics Card articles from around the web:
- Radeon HD 5750 review (Single GPU and CrossfireX performance) @ Guru 3D
- XFX Radeon HD5750 Video Card Review @ BmR
- AMD Radeon HD 5770 Crossfire Performance @ Legion Hardware
- PowerColor Radeon HD 5750 Review @ Neoseeker
- XFX HD 5850 1GB GDDR5 PCIe Graphics @ Overclock3D
- XFX Radeon HD 4890 1GB Video Card Review @ Legit Reviews
- HIS Radeon HD 5770 1GB and CrossFire performance review @ Elite Bastards
- Sapphire, XFX, Gigabyte Radeon HD 5850 Roundup @ motherboards.org
- Sapphire ATI Radeon HD 5770 & 5750 @ motherboards.org
- Nvidia GT 220 @ motherboards.org
- NVIDIA GeForce GT 220 @ Phoronix
Frankenstein Evergreen

Mixing and matching cards in Crossfire has been a risky venture in the past, but perhaps along with the new scaling that we see with the HD 58xx series that will be a thing of the past. Legit Reviews set out to determine what happens when you combine an HD5870 and an HD5850 on an ASUS P6T Deluxe V2. The results are actually a little confusing, but in a way that leaves hope for the future.