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.

Power, Temperature, & Noise
Comments Locked

71 Comments

View All Comments

  • DominionSeraph - Friday, February 19, 2010 - link

    Word Origin & History

    into

    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.

Log in

Don't have an account? Sign up now