In terms of overall gaming performance, the graphical capabilities of the AMD Radeon HD 5850 PowerColor PCS+ 1GB Edition are marginally better than the AMD Radeon HD 5850 MSI Twin Frozr II 1GB Edition.

The HD 5850 has a 35 MHz higher core clock speed and the same number of Texture Mapping Units as the HD 5850. This results in the HD 5850 providing 2.5 GTexel/s better texturing performance. This still holds weight but shader performance is generally more relevant, particularly since both of these GPUs support at least DirectX 10.

The HD 5850 has a 35 MHz higher core clock speed than the HD 5850 and the same number of Render Output Units. This results in the HD 5850 providing 1.1 GPixel/s better pixeling performance. However, both GPUs support DirectX 9 or above, and pixeling performance is only really relevant when comparing older cards.

The HD 5850 was released less than a year after the HD 5850, and so they are likely to have similar driver support for optimizing performance when running the latest games.

The Radeon HD 5850 MSI Twin Frozr II 1GB Edition and the Radeon HD 5850 PowerColor PCS+ 1GB Edition have the same amount of video memory, but are likely to provide slightly different experiences when displaying game textures at high resolutions.

The HD 5850 has 6.4 GB/sec greater memory bandwidth than the HD 5850, which means that the memory performance of the HD 5850 is marginally better than the HD 5850.

Both the Radeon HD 5850 MSI Twin Frozr II 1GB Edition and the Radeon HD 5850 PowerColor PCS+ 1GB Edition have 1440 Shader Processing Units. Having the same number of SPUs and using the same architecture means that the performance they offer can be compared by looking at the memory bandwidth, Texture and Pixel Rates. In this case, the HD 5850 has 2.5 GTexel/s better Texture Fill Rate, 1.1 GPixel/s better Pixel Fill Rate, and 6.4 GB/sec greater memory bandwidth, so should have a marginally faster performance than the HD 5850.

The Radeon HD 5850 MSI Twin Frozr II 1GB Edition requires 151 Watts to run and the Radeon HD 5850 PowerColor PCS+ 1GB Edition requires 151 Watts. We would recommend a PSU with at least 500 Watts for the HD 5850 and a PSU with at least 500 Watts for the HD 5850. The two GPUs require the same amount of wattage to run. As such, there is no need to worry about which will more significantly affect your yearly electricity bills.