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
DominionSeraph - Friday, February 19, 2010 - link
Word Origin & Historyinto
O.E. into, originally in to.
pattycake0147 - Friday, February 19, 2010 - link
There was a lot of talk about the inability to over-volt the card. Is there any way to under-volt the card to decrease the temperatures any more.Ryan Smith - Friday, February 19, 2010 - link
Yes. The AMD GPU Clock Tool would let you pick one of the lower voltages that the card uses in its various power modes. However just as you can't go above 1.088v, you wouldn't be able to go below 0.95v.7Enigma - Friday, February 19, 2010 - link
Man I wish they would release a newer version of the GPU Clock Tool. It has never worked properly with my 4870 for voltage control, and that stinks. I run it undervolted unless gaming, but the program glitch only drops it 0.1v. Underclocking, however, still nets me >40w reduction in power!overzealot - Friday, February 19, 2010 - link
Doesn't MSI afterburner with unofficial overclocking work with this card? Seems to be fine with other 5850's.P.S. I know there's issues with the current catalyst release.
Ryan Smith - Friday, February 19, 2010 - link
Unfortunately it does not.overzealot - Monday, February 22, 2010 - link
:'(Hypernikes - Thursday, February 18, 2010 - link
It seems the power and temperature graphs need to be switched.blyndy - Friday, February 19, 2010 - link
"Process problems over at TSMC and a lack of a competitive card from NVIDIA has resulted in a level of demand that until this year could not be satiated."Are you painting Nvidia as a victim? The process problems affected both of them. Whereas ATI built cypress as a 334mm2 chip on a process they had learnt, Nvidia decided to dust off a shelved project, an unfamiliar generic 'compute' design similar to Larrabee, designed it at over 500mm2, and on a process they hadn't fully worked out.
Cypress has strong demand because because it is the highest performing chip available, has DX11 and eyefinity.
philosofa - Saturday, February 20, 2010 - link
That's a strange interpretation of what the writer said Blyndy, they're clearly not painting Nvidia as a victim.