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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CptTripps - Friday, February 19, 2010 - link
That sentence is cut and dry and you are really reaching to cause problems where there is none. Everyone else got what was said and did not feel the need to read between the lines because there is nothing to read.I got exactly this from the sentence...
"Due to intial fab problems and no competition from Nvidia the demand for the 5xxx series has been so high that it could not be filled until now".
7Enigma - Friday, February 19, 2010 - link
Fanboy sit down. The sentence is clearly saying there are 2 factors as to why the demand has been so high. 1 is due to lack of inventory, and 2 is due to lack of competition. If anything it's ragging on NVIDIA a bit.Unbelievable what some people want to harp on!
Ryan Smith - Friday, February 19, 2010 - link
Just so that everyone is clear, this is exactly what I mean (other than the ragging on NVIDIA bit).blyndy - Friday, February 19, 2010 - link
Incorrect. It is not clear."Process problems over at TSMC and a lack of a competitive card from NVIDIA has resulted in a level of demand that until this year could not be satiated." is ambiguous -- it can easily be interpreted in a different way than to your interpretation. A hint for you: it hinges on the word 'demand'.
FATCamaro - Friday, February 19, 2010 - link
FANBOY SIT DOWN WAS APPROPRIATE.Griswold - Sunday, February 21, 2010 - link
Shaddap nutsack, as well.Rindis - Friday, February 19, 2010 - link
Gratuitous caps lock was not.Voo - Friday, February 19, 2010 - link
I think it's absolutely clear for anyone who doesn't read his own preferences into every other sentence..b15h09 - Friday, February 19, 2010 - link
Doesn't sound too ambiguous to me. Low production and no comparative alternative means high demand. Pretty straight forward.Hypernikes - Thursday, February 18, 2010 - link
Nevermind. Looks like it was fixed.