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
Power, Temperature, & Noise
On the one hand, by overclocking this card Sapphire has ultimately increased the power draw of the card and the amount of heat it will be generating. On the other hand with the Vapor-X cooler, they’re better equipped to siphon out that heat, and to do so without making much in the way of additional noise. So let’s see how things pan out.
Right off the bat, the Toxic is at a disadvantage for power usage as we expected. At idle it operates at the same voltages and clocks as a reference 5850, so our 9W difference ultimately comes down to board differences; remember, the Toxic has a number of additional components compared to the reference card, particularly capacitors. Under load the difference is 17W, due to a combination of components and clock speeds. This is ultimately in-line with where you’d expect it to be based on the higher clock speeds.
Moving to temperature, we can see the difference the Vapor-X cooler makes. The 5850 was always a particularly cool card, and surprisingly the Toxic does worse here. We’re measuring the temperature of the GPU, so any extra heat produced by the Toxic’s component selection shouldn’t be factoring in. The difference likely comes down to the coolers – a shrouded blower that fully exhausts hot air looks to be a more efficient option under these circumstances.
It’s under load where the Vapor-X cooler on the Toxic shines. Even though the card is overclocked and drawing an additional 17W, it still bests the reference cooler by 3C. It’s not a massive amount, but then again it’s only 3C warmer than even the 5670.
So the reference 5850 cooler may be a bit better at keeping temperatures down at idle, but it’s not the quietest option. Here the Toxic can do 2dB quieter. It’s a similar story under load, where it’s 2.4dB quieter than the reference cooler, and once again take in to consideration the fact that the Toxic is dispersing 17W of additional heat in the process.
As for our fully overclocked Toxic, the 895MHz/1175MHz clocks push power consumption up by another 27W to 339W under load. Even with the now 44W difference between it and the reference 5850, the noise generated by the Toxic and the GPU temperatures are in a dead-heat with the much slower reference 5850. There’s no question that the Toxic’s Vapor-X cooler is a superior cooler, and this leaves us wondering just how much more it can take if we could overvolt the GPU.
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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.