Availability check: Radeon HD 5850s are still scarce

AMD’s Radeon HD 5850 has been out for over a week now, but online retail availability doesn’t seem to have improved much since we looked last Thursday. This time, we chose to do a more formal cataloging of cards following our customary availability check template.

We limited our search to Newegg, TigerDirect, ZipZoomFly, and Buy.com in the United States, because those are the four computer hardware e-tailers with the most reviews on both our price search engine and ResellerRatings.com. We probed availability and pricing north of the border by looking at NCIX.

The cards we found are listed below with available models highlighted in green. All prices are in U.S. dollars except for NCIX’s, which are in Canadian dollars.  We didn’t factor mail-in rebates into our prices.

Well, you don’t have much choice, it looks like. We found only a single available model in the U.S. and one in Canada. The U.S. model is marked up $10 above AMD’s suggested retail price, too, even though it only has a two-year warranty and lacks perks like higher-than-normal clock speeds.

NCIX, meanwhile, carries a lone PowerColor card for $299.99 CAD ($285 USD). That said, a stock check shows fewer than ten cards in a single facility in Richmond, British Columbia. The e-tailer quotes one- to five-day lead times on other models.

Update 4:46 PM: The HIS and PowerColor cards have both gone out of stock at ZipZoomFly and NCIX, respectively. All aforementioned Radeon HD 5850 models are unavailable right now.

Update 10/09 3:30 PM: Availability seems to have improved today. Newegg has PowerColor and Sapphire cards in stock for $259.99, and ZipZoomFly has a Diamond variant available for $279.99. In Canada, NCIX currently carries both Diamond and PowerColor cards.