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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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.