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
Overclocking
With Sapphire’s superior Vapor-X cooler, the 5850 Toxic is a strong candidate for overclocking. However currently none of our overclocking tools know how to overvolt the card, so any overclocking is limited to what you can get at the 5850’s stock voltage: 1.088v.
With that in mind, we were able to use the AMD GPU Clock Tool to push our card by a further 130MHz on the core to 895MHz, and an additional 50MHz on the memory to 1175MHz. This is 17% core overclock and 4% memory overclock respectively. Thus unlike the already overclocked Toxic card, the games that will respond the best here are those that are GPU limited instead of memory bandwidth limited.
Out of the 3 games we’re taking a look at for overclocking results, the benefit varies wildly. Battleforge is rather insensitive at only a 5% performance increase, while Dawn of War II is nearly linear with the GPU clockspeed increase, for 16%. Thus our results are much like the benefit of Sapphire’s factory overclock in the first place: there’s no rule of thumb, the benefit of overclocking is going to vary wildly depending on the game.
We should note that at these clockspeeds we’re some 23% faster than the 5850’s GPU clock speed, and 17% faster than its memory clock speeds. Thus at these maxed out levels, our further overclocked 5850 Toxic is 17% faster at Crysis, 10% faster at Battleforge, and 18% faster at Battleforge. What’s particularly noteworthy is that the overclocked Toxic actually manages to best the 5870 here, even though the 5870 has another SIMD to work with. This indicates that Battleforge it bottlenecked by the ROPs, or at some point in the fixed-function pipeline.
Temperature, power, and noise results for our overclocked 5850 Toxic are on the next page.
Facebook
Twitter
RSS
71 Comments
View All Comments
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.