Sapphire’s Radeon HD 5850 Toxic Edition: Our First Fully-Custom 5850
by Ryan Smith on February 18, 2010 10:00 PM EST- Posted in
- GPUs
Overclocking
With Sapphire’s superior Vapor-X cooler, the 5850 Toxic is a strong candidate for overclocking. However currently none of our overclocking tools know how to overvolt the card, so any overclocking is limited to what you can get at the 5850’s stock voltage: 1.088v.
With that in mind, we were able to use the AMD GPU Clock Tool to push our card by a further 130MHz on the core to 895MHz, and an additional 50MHz on the memory to 1175MHz. This is 17% core overclock and 4% memory overclock respectively. Thus unlike the already overclocked Toxic card, the games that will respond the best here are those that are GPU limited instead of memory bandwidth limited.
Out of the 3 games we’re taking a look at for overclocking results, the benefit varies wildly. Battleforge is rather insensitive at only a 5% performance increase, while Dawn of War II is nearly linear with the GPU clockspeed increase, for 16%. Thus our results are much like the benefit of Sapphire’s factory overclock in the first place: there’s no rule of thumb, the benefit of overclocking is going to vary wildly depending on the game.
We should note that at these clockspeeds we’re some 23% faster than the 5850’s GPU clock speed, and 17% faster than its memory clock speeds. Thus at these maxed out levels, our further overclocked 5850 Toxic is 17% faster at Crysis, 10% faster at Battleforge, and 18% faster at Battleforge. What’s particularly noteworthy is that the overclocked Toxic actually manages to best the 5870 here, even though the 5870 has another SIMD to work with. This indicates that Battleforge it bottlenecked by the ROPs, or at some point in the fixed-function pipeline.
Temperature, power, and noise results for our overclocked 5850 Toxic are on the next page.
Facebook
Twitter
RSS
71 Comments
View All Comments
soccerplayer88 - Thursday, February 25, 2010 - link
I'll give you all a hint for overclocking it further. Flash the bios.Hell I just told you what to do, now you just have to google it.
Anyways, I've pushed my card to 880/1220. And by the way, what's up with your temps?! My card overclocked to hell is about 10C cooler than your setup. Sounds like poor airflow to me.
dvdreplication - Thursday, February 25, 2010 - link
Well it looks like a giant. Is it fixed or not? I hope that it 'll prove to be a great product. Thanks for sharing such an informative article.darthbinky - Tuesday, February 23, 2010 - link
For what it's worth, I thought I'd mention that I saw this card for sale on SuperBiiz.com for $310 with a promo code. Everywhere else seems to be selling them for upwards of $350, with stock running out.http://www.ewiz.com/detail.php?p=AT-585TX1G&c=...">http://www.ewiz.com/detail.php?p=AT-585TX1G&c=...
I haven't ordered from this site before (I usually go Newegg), so don't consider this a recommendation.
v12v12 - Monday, February 22, 2010 - link
Goooood LORD look at the power requirements at load!? The noise and heat?! The GPU industry is LAUGHABLE Vs CPU Vs common-sense engineering. Still more brute-force crapware being metered out to the public. While CPUs are completely in another universe regarding TDP.SINGLE-core? Why in the hell are there still these relics being mass produced? METERED-TECHNOLOGY folks... you're all getting hustled w/every release of the market spin-masters "toxic, lava, HAL9000, Halo3" edition releases. Stop buying this crap and they'll stop producing it!?
Lastly: I've noticed that with many of these so-called "performance" stock HSFs= the engineering tolerances are WAAAAY off! There's all kinds of gaps between the HSF and the ram ICs! They use the cheapest POS, filler TIM (thermal-interface-material) they possibly can to omit real design tolerances! White zinc-gunk is what I call it... When are we going to start demanding some real innovations here with these fraudsters? 3-pipe, aluminum HSF? Ummm GARBAGE! I'll take Zalman's VF-900 and all the custom brackets and stuff that people have been making for YEARS—will still outperform this crap metal, shived lump of a HSF.
__What a joke... soon as you buy one of these cards, you're dropping another $30-50 on real after-market HSF + TIM + time if you want anything livable and not an in-case heater unit. Come on folks... this is the best you can spend your dollars on? Over-priced, under-equipped, cheaply cooled junk... Kids these days are even more the suckers than they assume their parents are. You guys have no clue how to smart-shop if you're buying into all this gimmick-marketing.
Give me a damn OEM card, no cooler, no cheap TIM; nothing but the PCB! No fancy ass colors and sh!t esp. WHO CARES what color it is, if it's adding another $10+ to the cost of the card. The whole point of the card is to go INTO a box and PERFORM. I don't want to hear, nor see the card glowing from LEDS or marvel at some "awesome" paint job. When are people going to get that, FORM FOLLOWS FUNCTION! Oh wait not in marketing-sucker's-world-2.0....
Seesh.
ThermalVent - Friday, March 5, 2010 - link
Erm why not take your ass out of your head.. I brought one of these at a cut price.I get 900Mhz + out of the core and 1300Mhz memory, completely stable and thoroughly tested.
Not once does it go over 50 Degress celcius under full load for several hours, when idle at these clocks it sits at 23 degrees....................
ThermalVent - Monday, March 8, 2010 - link
make that 1050 core and 1300 memory, completely stable and 28c idle 52 full load after several hours of playing games!austonia - Tuesday, February 23, 2010 - link
lame attempt at trolling or just ignorant and off medication? hard to tell.v12v12 - Friday, February 26, 2010 - link
Cut the ad hominem and refute my claims then if you've got something intelligent/on topic to say? If not, please stop wasting time with juvenile 1-upping; douche.austonia - Monday, February 22, 2010 - link
for a custom card the OC capability is pretty weak, especially considering the additional expense. i have a stock Sapphire 5850 that runs at 900 core/1300 memory at stock voltage, and 1000/1300 at 1.25v using AMD GPU clock tool and MSI Afterburner utility. stable in Crysis benchmark looping and Furmark. this was from an early batch too, about a month after they came out.araczynski - Monday, February 22, 2010 - link
after all these years i'm still seeing no reason to upgrade my 4850x2.