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.
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MamiyaOtaru - Friday, February 19, 2010 - link
I'd get this if I could run it at stock speeds and power draw. I'm more interested in running cooler and quieter than in taking the overhead offered by a better cooler and jacking up the speed and wasting a good part of the power and noise advantage one would have had.Ryan Smith - Friday, February 19, 2010 - link
You can always downclock it if that's your thing. Although in that case you'd be better off with the cheaper Vapor-X version, if you're in a region where it's offered.MamiyaOtaru - Monday, February 22, 2010 - link
I'm not :( Still, even with downclocking, is it going to be at the power draw of the stock card? I thought there were some additional phases or something on this card that made it use more power even without the overclock (could definitely be mistaken here)Mr Perfect - Friday, February 19, 2010 - link
I was thinking the same thing.A year ago, PowerColor had a redesigned 4850 board with HDMI, DP and custom cooling on the GPU, RAM, and VRMs, so I bought theirs instead of other manufacturers' reference boards.
It has no overclock, but it's the first video card since my Voodoo 3 that I didn't have to rip the stock heatsink off of. No added expense of aftermarket coolers and no voided warranty. Big points for that!
kb9fcc - Friday, February 19, 2010 - link
"...9W difference ultimately comes down to board differences; remember, the Toxic has a number of additional components compared to the reference card, particularly capacitors..."Ideally, capacitors should not dissipate power, they should only store and release stored energy. Any capacitors as small as these losing this much power (9W) are going to get really hot and are not going to continue to be capacitors for very long.
So, I can deal with the board design differences, but it's not the caps that are the cause of the extra power draw, unless they're really junk, which from the overall performance of this board would suggest, they are not.
Deville - Friday, February 19, 2010 - link
If you're testing a DX11 video card, Why not test using a DX11 game?How about Dirt 2? It's a popular game, has its own benchmarking program in the graphics options section, is a visually stunning racing sim (not everybody likes to see FPS type games being the only ones that make your shootouts), and is one of few titles out right now that can really show off the new DX11 hardware.
Voo - Friday, February 19, 2010 - link
Probably because they could only compare them to other Ati cards, which is only half as interesting as it could be.I'm sure we'll get DX11 benches as soon as fermi appears.
Ryan Smith - Friday, February 19, 2010 - link
Correct. The plan is to refresh the benchmark suite for Fermi. This takes a bit of time obviously, since we have to redo a very large number of cards.just4U - Friday, February 19, 2010 - link
While reading this article I was twice redirected to a online scanner that said I had a crapload of viruses (which ofcourse it wanted to clean) I didn't bother with it and just shut down my browser and restarted it.as I've seen that thing once or twice before.Nothing to do with this article tho lol just wondering if those prompts come from the site or not. (according to malware and windows security essentials I don't have any viruses)
It's almost like a add that tries to trick you into thinking it's your virus scanner.
Voo - Friday, February 19, 2010 - link
If you don't click on any adds it shouldn't redirect you and I never had the problem with any AT article. Sounds like you've got a homemade problem there.