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
The Test & Results
Sapphire’s 5850 Toxic edition is clocked at 765MHz/1125MHz, a 5.5%/12.5% overclock on the core and memory respectively. So performance compared to a reference 5850 can be anywhere between no improvement (CPU limited) to a full 12.5% improvement if the bottleneck is memory bandwidth. This of course will vary from game to game.
| CPU: | Intel Core i7-920 @ 3.33GHz |
| Motherboard: | Intel DX58SO (Intel X58) |
| Chipset Drivers: | Intel 9.1.1.1015 (Intel) |
| Hard Disk: | Intel X25-M SSD (80GB) |
| Memory: | Patriot Viper DDR3-1333 3 x 2GB (7-7-7-20) |
| Video Cards: |
AMD Radeon HD 5970 AMD Radeon HD 5870 AMD Radeon HD 5850 AMD Radeon HD 5770 AMD Radeon HD 5750 AMD Radeon HD 5670 512MB AMD Radeon HD 4890 AMD Radeon HD 4870 1GB AMD Radeon HD 4850 AMD Radeon HD 3870 AMD Radeon HD 4770 AMD Radeon HD 4670 512MB NVIDIA GeForce GTX 295 NVIDIA GeForce GTX 285 NVIDIA GeForce GTX 275 NVIDIA GeForce GTX 260 Core 216 NVIDIA GeForce GTS 250 NVIDIA GeForce 8800 GT |
| Video Drivers: |
NVIDIA ForceWare 190.62 NVIDIA ForceWare 195.62 AMD Catalyst Beta 8.66 AMD Catalyst Beta 8.66.6 AMD Catalyst 9.9 AMD Catalyst Beta 8.69 |
| OS: | Windows 7 Ultimate 64-bit |
The difference, as we expected, is varying from game to game. The factory overclock on the 5850 Toxic isn’t enough to significantly shift the performance of the card, but it’s enough for 5-10% better than a stock-clocked 5850.
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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.