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
A Quick Note on AMD & Factory Clocks
While we were talking to Sapphire about the Toxic 5850, we asked them whether we would be seeing a Toxic 5870 to complement the 5850. We got a surprising answer and an even more surprising reason behind it that we’d like to share with you.
Sapphire will not be producing a 5870 Toxic, and the reason for that is that AMD won’t let them (or anyone else) offer a factory-overclocked card that runs significantly faster than their existing Vapor-X card (875MHz). This apparently isn’t a huge secret, but this is the first time we’ve heard this.
When we asked AMD about this, they told us that this all boils down to what AMD believes is safe operation for their chips. AMD allows vendors to factory overclock their chips to whatever point AMD feels is as high as they can safely go, and no higher. If any significant number of them could go higher, then AMD would have released them as a higher-end bin.
This put’s AMD’s limits at around 875MHz for the 5870, and 765MHz for the 5850. Note that AMD’s Overdrive limits are still higher than this, particularly on the 5870 where Overdrive goes to 900MHz. In practice we were able to get our 5850 Toxic to 895MHz without any kind of voltage adjustment, so even with some breathing room we believe that Cypress chips assigned 5850 status for defective unit reasons (that is, it’s not a 5870 because it has a defective SIMD) are plenty capable of going higher. Particularly with Sapphire’s Vapor-X cooler, the heat isn’t an issue.
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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