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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DominionSeraph - Friday, February 19, 2010 - link
Word Origin & Historyinto
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Man I wish they would release a newer version of the GPU Clock Tool.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.