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.
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CptTripps - Friday, February 19, 2010 - link
That sentence is cut and dry and you are really reaching to cause problems where there is none. Everyone else got what was said and did not feel the need to read between the lines because there is nothing to read.I got exactly this from the sentence...
"Due to intial fab problems and no competition from Nvidia the demand for the 5xxx series has been so high that it could not be filled until now".
7Enigma - Friday, February 19, 2010 - link
Fanboy sit down. The sentence is clearly saying there are 2 factors as to why the demand has been so high. 1 is due to lack of inventory, and 2 is due to lack of competition. If anything it's ragging on NVIDIA a bit.Unbelievable what some people want to harp on!
Ryan Smith - Friday, February 19, 2010 - link
Just so that everyone is clear, this is exactly what I mean (other than the ragging on NVIDIA bit).blyndy - Friday, February 19, 2010 - link
Incorrect. It is not clear."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." is ambiguous -- it can easily be interpreted in a different way than to your interpretation. A hint for you: it hinges on the word 'demand'.
FATCamaro - Friday, February 19, 2010 - link
FANBOY SIT DOWN WAS APPROPRIATE.Griswold - Sunday, February 21, 2010 - link
Shaddap nutsack, as well.Rindis - Friday, February 19, 2010 - link
Gratuitous caps lock was not.Voo - Friday, February 19, 2010 - link
I think it's absolutely clear for anyone who doesn't read his own preferences into every other sentence..b15h09 - Friday, February 19, 2010 - link
Doesn't sound too ambiguous to me. Low production and no comparative alternative means high demand. Pretty straight forward.Hypernikes - Thursday, February 18, 2010 - link
Nevermind. Looks like it was fixed.