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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Ryan Smith - Friday, February 19, 2010 - link
For temperature testing, we use a fully assembled Thermaltake Spedo. So yes, it's a well ventilated case.Being an open-ended cooler, a well-ventilated case is something that's of greater importance than on a reference card. But at the same time, you need a well-ventilated case anyhow just to avoid having negative air pressure in the case, because a reference 5800 card is going to be blowing out quite a bit of air.
Mr Alpha - Friday, February 19, 2010 - link
Are we going to get to see new idle power numbers with Catalyst 10.2 at some point?What about the availability of the 5970? In this part of the world I haven't seen a single one yet, and prices have been creeping up and are getting to the €700 mark. Is it turning into vaporware?
Ryan Smith - Friday, February 19, 2010 - link
ULPS only impacts the idle power performance of CF setups. It doesn't impact single cards.Calin - Friday, February 19, 2010 - link
As it appears in the pictures, it's wrong (Celsius is the correct text, not Celcius as written)Patrick Wolf - Friday, February 19, 2010 - link
Well, I'm sold. Where do I sign?NO! Must...wait...for Fermi. Ugh.
phaxmohdem - Friday, February 19, 2010 - link
Sign now! By the time Fermi actually gets released, it WILL be in super limited quantities, and I highly doubt we'll see any lower end derivatives than the 470/480 models from the original Fermi series. It is already 6 months or so late, so it is encroaching on Fermi 2's timeline.My way of thinking, HD5K series now, Fermi 2, when nVidia gets their act together and works out the bugs. It's not like we'll see any useful apps that can harness the purported GPGPU power of Fermi before the HD6K/Fusion series and Fermi2 lines are out anyway.
spidey81 - Friday, February 19, 2010 - link
I'll have to agree with him on waiting for Fermi. Not that I want a Fermi based card but that I imagine we will see a $20 to $50 price cut off the top and probably $10 to $20 MIRs on the 5850's and 5870's. At the MSRP I would buy a 5870, but not at the market inflated prices that they are at currently.whatthehey - Friday, February 19, 2010 - link
Okay, a few things I have to get off my chest:Page 2: "If any significant number of them could go higher, then AMD would have released them as a higher-end bin."
I call bunk! What's far more likely is that AMD doesn't want any overclocked GPUs coming out that will end up being as fast as the inevitable 5890 or whatever the speed bumped version is called.
Second, why are there no power and noise results for the 5870? These really need to be included.
Finally, a grammar rant. You get these enough I'm sure, so feel free to ignore me. Anyway, "in to" versus "into". I don't think you're getting it quite right a lot of the time. I've noticed Ryan never uses "into". There are places to use "in to" (i.e. "I turned in to the driveway." because "turned in" is a phrasal verb), but there are also times where you need to use "into".
Taking something into consideration is a tough call; I prefer "into" and you use "in to", and I'm not sure which is correct. However, I'd say you definitely throw a wrench INTO gears/recommendations, not throw a wrench IN TO recommendations. Into is typically directional in use. But I could be wrong.
At any rate, you should probably read this:
http://grammartips.homestead.com/into.html">http://grammartips.homestead.com/into.html
Here's one source that agrees with "take in to consideration" as correct:
http://dictionary.reference.com/browse/take+in+to+...">http://dictionary.reference.com/browse/take+in+to+...
But they also say "take into consideration" is correct (and in both cases they list "take into consideration" lower on the page):
http://dictionary.reference.com/browse/take+into+c...">http://dictionary.reference.com/browse/take+into+c...
I still don't like "take in to", but maybe it's because I subscribe to this sort of writing philosophy: Use "into" unless it doesn't make sense that way, like turning a paper into your teacher.
http://en.allexperts.com/q/General-Writing-Grammar...">http://en.allexperts.com/q/General-Writing-Grammar...
jajig - Sunday, February 21, 2010 - link
Thanks for the grammar tip.7Enigma - Friday, February 19, 2010 - link
Agreed. Ryan, call it like it is. We know with no competetion they do not want to be eroding the price premium of the 5870. You can see with your OC you already almost have parity between the 2 in some games. It's all about money, and with no competition it's their right, no matter how much it stinks.