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
Conclusion
Vendor overclocked cards tend to throw a wrench in to our recommendations due to their very specific price points and the fact that they’re often just “X but 5% faster” products, leaving us with little to say about the product. Thankfully Sapphire’s 5850 Toxic Edition is not one of those cards.
Sapphire’s Vapor-X cooler is once again a tangible benefit to the product. Their marketing literature ultimately overstates the benefit by claiming that they can get upwards of a 15C and 10dB improvement in temperature and noise respectively, but it’s clear that it’s still a better cooler than our reference cooler. It’s not a night-and-day difference, but it’s better.
As for the custom board, it’s not as strong of a selling point. On a professional level we’re interested in it because after 5 months it’s the first thing we’ve seen that’s different from a reference 5850. From a feature and value standpoint however it’s a wash. The extra idle power usage is 9W over a reference card that only consumes 27W idle power, so the 5850’s amazingly low idle power usage takes a hit of 33%. We would have also liked to see the PCIe power plugs get moved up top, since the card surpassed 10” in length.
On the plus side, we’re quite happy to see a real heatsink setup for the 5850’s VRMs. The 5850 really isn’t the right card to benefit from it (particularly when we can’t overvolt it) given that the 5850 doesn’t drive the VRMs especially hard, but it’s a series-wide weakness that we’re glad someone took care of. We’ll hold off on talking about overclocking for now since we haven’t seen any other vendor’s 5850s (particularly those with overvolting options) and our own 5850 reference cards are especially poor overclockers. To that end we don’t have enough data (or really any good way to collect it) to quantify any possible advantages of the Toxic’s custom board – all we can tell you with absolute certainty is that it’s big and it’s blue.
Throwing out the custom board for a moment, between the Vapor-X cooler and the factory overclock the 5850 Toxic Edition is clearly superior over the reference 5850 for most purposes. Sapphire told us that the MSRP on the Toxic is $319, which at today’s average 5850 price of $299 puts it at a mere $20 over those reference cards. For a 6.5% increase in price we get around that much of an improvement in performance and a better cooler, and that would make the Toxic an easy card to recommend.
Instead, like virtually every other 5800-series product, the card is selling for above MSRP. Right now the Toxic is going for around $339, which makes it $40 (or 13%) more expensive than a reference 5850. This is still below the 5870 by a wide margin, but it puts it at the top of the 5850s in terms of price. At $339, it’s not the steal that it was at $319. It’s the best you can do if you can’t afford a 5870, otherwise the price gap is a bit much. Since it was just launched, we’d recommend waiting a week or two and see if the price stays that far above MSRP.
In the absence of enough data to work with to properly compare the overclocking capabilities of the 5850 Toxic Edition or to quantify the benefits of a custom board, the only thing we can really work with is the factory overclock, the Vapor-X cooler, and the price. The 5850 is already a fairly cool card, so while the Vapor-X cooler is superior to the reference cooler, it’s not enough of a reason on its own to justify the Toxic. But if you take that in to consideration with the factory overclock and the price, if the actual retail price of the Toxic can come closer towards the MSRP and the existing reference cards, then Sapphire would have a sure winner on their hands.
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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.