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.
71 Comments
View All Comments
Alouette Radeon - Wednesday, March 24, 2010 - link
Agreed, I see no reason to upgrade my HD 4870.strikeback03 - Monday, February 22, 2010 - link
Umm, the 4850x2 hasn't been available for "years", it was released Q3 2008.Iketh - Sunday, February 21, 2010 - link
Hey Ryan, just a small tip for your writing technique. Page 5, first line: "amount of heat it will be generating" can be "amount of heat it will generate" or furthermore "amount of heat it generates"d4a2n0k - Sunday, February 21, 2010 - link
Ive had an Asus 5850 since September '09 that is not limited by this so called hard limit set in place by AMD. It ships with an overclock program and bios that is not crippled like these Sapphire cards. Ive had it running at 925/1300 at stock voltage for the past five months stable but if I needed to I can mess with the voltage. Now explain to me how this card is worth the premium.AmdInside - Sunday, February 21, 2010 - link
Sounds silly but I ordered this card mainly because of the blue heatsink. I don't know why red is popular for computer hardware. Cars are the only items I can think of that look good in red. My keyboard has blue lighted keys. My mouse has blue backlight and my Dell monitors main button glows blue so I wanted something to match.Alouette Radeon - Wednesday, March 24, 2010 - link
Umm, well, Red IS the Colour of ATi, after all! LOLIDontKnowWhat - Sunday, February 21, 2010 - link
It's now for sale at Newegg for $160 and it features a custom PCB, custom fan, and different connectors (DVI, VGA, and HDMI).spigzone - Friday, February 19, 2010 - link
Powercolor's had a non-reference card out for a while, it has a larger, quieter fan, runs cooler, has essentially the same factory overclock, and costs $40 less.Just saying.
Godzealot - Friday, February 19, 2010 - link
I OC my old vanilla 5850 to 785/1200 daily right when I turn on the computer no problemsleexgx - Friday, February 19, 2010 - link
have the VRMs been fixed, as the 5850 i got here is making more noise then my GTX280 i used to have until i cooked it