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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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