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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just4U - Friday, February 19, 2010 - link
Yeah turned out to be Java:selace ... Don't know where the hell I could have picked it up from. Ah well cleaned after a full check.7Enigma - Friday, February 19, 2010 - link
It's not from Anand's site, though I've gotten that at work from another site which resulted in a hosed system (they use an old version of IE without popup blocker and won't let 3rd party browsers be used...).just4U - Friday, February 19, 2010 - link
I am using IE8 here with all security patches in play. Going to do a full scan with Malwarebytes and MS SecurityE and see if they pick anything up.. just did quick scans afterall.It bypassed the popup blocker initially and showed a small prompt on screen saying I may be infected. Closing and canceling had no effect as it still re-routed my browser to a look-alike Vista control panel type page.
7Enigma - Friday, February 19, 2010 - link
Please in the future when testing a factory overclocked card highlight the STOCK card in the graphs. It's frustrating to constantly hunt through the cards in each chart to see the difference between the stock 5850 and the Sapphire card.Thanks.
legoman666 - Friday, February 19, 2010 - link
You mention an overdrive clock limit of 775. My 5850 is currently running at 825 overclocked via CCC. It goes even higher; somewhere around 900. Why are you using the 9.9s when the 10.2's are available? Maybe that's why your overclock is so limited.Ryan Smith - Friday, February 19, 2010 - link
It's not a driver issue. The OD limit is hardcoded in to the BIOS. My reference 5850s have the same 775/1125 limit.What 5850 do you have? None of them should be shipping with a higher overdrive limit from what AMD tells me.
legoman666 - Sunday, February 21, 2010 - link
http://i28.photobucket.com/albums/c241/legoman666/...">http://i28.photobucket.com/albums/c241/legoman666/... @ 825legoman666 - Sunday, February 21, 2010 - link
http://i28.photobucket.com/albums/c241/legoman666/...">http://i28.photobucket.com/albums/c241/legoman666/...I have an Asus EAH5850. It's at stock clocks in the pic, but I've had it up to ~880.
Barneyk - Friday, February 19, 2010 - link
That was a bit strange to me. The card keeps most of the heat dissipated from the card in the case and it produces more heat then a standard 5850.So if you have a very well-ventilated case I guess its not an issue but what if you dont?
Would you still recommend it?
erple2 - Friday, February 19, 2010 - link
I don't think that he mentions what portion of the heat the Toxic vents into vs. out of the case. However, it would stand to reason that a well-ventilated case would be important either way.That does bring up an interesting point, however, that may be outside of the scope of this article. I'm assuming that all of the testing is done in a well-ventilated case. If the temperatures inside of the case were sufficiently high enough, it would start to impact the temperature of the card significantly. Given that the Toxic runs "cooler" than the stock card, one of two things is true:
1. The recirculating temperature problem is a non-issue
2. The case Ryan uses is well ventilated and thus the temperature problem is a non-issue.
The conclusion, then, is that it's a non-issue. However, who, buying an enthusiast card like this for 300+ dollars, doesn't have a well-ventilated case? I suppose that there are people out there that don't. Perhaps an investment in a quality case would be in order? At least, case performance takes a long time to become obsolete (unlike, for example, video cards).