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Sapphire Radeon 5850 Toxic Review February 22, 2010 Brandon Sandman Bell |
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Summary: With vapor chamber cooling and heatpipes, Sapphire's 5850 Toxic ships with cooling that blows the Radeon 5850 reference design out of the water. But it doesn't stop there, the board is OC'ed for even more performance. See how it fares against the GeForce GTX 285, Radeon 5870, and stock 5850 in today's review!
 Sapphire Radeon 5850 Toxic Review | Page:: ( 1 / 12 ) |
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Now that ATI’s sorted out their supply issues with the Radeon 5800 series, they’re opening things up and allowing their board partners to differentiate their cards from each other: in the coming months, ASUS, MSI, PowerColor and others will begin releasing custom Radeon 5850 boards that don’t rely on ATI’s reference board design and cooling. As a result, you’ll finally see some variety amongst the 5850 boards at retail; finally the cards themselves won’t be exact replicas of each other!They’ll all be hard-pressed to top Sapphire though.
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Sapphire’s latest creation is the Radeon 5850 Toxic Edition. Like many of the high-end 5850 boards that are already available on the market, the 5850 Toxic Edition is factory OC’ed to deliver even more performance than the stock 5850 specifications provide. Where the Toxic differs from those other boards though is in its cooling, as Sapphire ships the Toxic with their own custom cooling solution. If you recall our review of Sapphire’s 5870 Toxic board from November, you know that we were enamored with Sapphire’s custom cooler, which relies on vapor chamber cooling technology along with heatpipes.
This combination proved to be quite potent, allowing the 5870 Toxic to run up to 11 degrees Celsius than ATI’s stock cooler in our testing, all while running five decibels cooler at load.
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Sapphire makes even bolder claims for the 5850 Toxic. Their PR states that the 5850 Toxic runs up to 15 degrees cooler than reference, while generating 10 dB less noise than stock 5850 cards.
Those are pretty bold claims, especially considering that the Radeon 5850 runs fairly cool and quiet in stock form. Let’s see if Sapphire can deliver…
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| Board analysis | Page:: ( 2 / 12 ) |
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At the heart of Sapphire’s 5850 Toxic is without a doubt its vapor chamber cooler.
The cooler itself is very similar to what Sapphire used last year on the 5870 Toxic. The vapor chamber cooler is placed inside a copper baseplate, just like the 5870 Toxic. It rests directly above the GPU, drawing heat off the chip. This heat is then transferred into various wicks inside the vapor chamber.
There’s a vaporization wick, where heat from the GPU causes the liquid inside the vapor chamber to vaporize. This water vapor then moves through the vacuum until it hits the condensation wick. Here the water vapor condenses and forms back into a liquid (releasing the heat in the process); this liquid is then absorbed by the transportation wick by capillary action, where it’s then transported back to the vaporization wick and the process is repeated.
To keep the vapor chamber cool, Sapphire uses three copper heatpipes, these are attached directly to the vapor chamber. Any remaining heat from the vapor chamber is transferred to the heatpipes, which are massive in size.
This heatpipe+vapor chamber cooling combination can dissipate a large amount of heat, and needs to be cooled in order to prevent creating a huge hotspot on top of the GPU. To accomplish this Sapphire employs a dual-slot aluminum heatsink+fan unit. The fan Sapphire uses is a 2-ball bearing unit, rather than sleeve bearings. Ball bearing fans tend to be more expensive than sleeve bearing fans, but they tend to generate less noise and are also more durable. In operation the 5850 Toxic generates so little noise that we couldn’t get a reading from a distance of 6” with our Extech sound level meter (our meter can read down to 40dB).
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The cooler is encased inside a stylish plastic duct. Here we should note that the duct isn’t completely enclosed – there are multiple gaps for heat to escape. As such, not all the hot air from the GPU is exhausted out the back of your system case. In fact, more hot air probably escapes out the sides and back of the card than is exhausted outside the case, so you will want to plan accordingly and ensure the inside of your case is adequately ventilated with good airflow near the graphics card.
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To make room for the vapor chamber cooler, Sapphire uses a 10.1” PCB on the 5850 Toxic. This is a little longer than ATI’s reference design for the 5850, which measures in at 9.5”, but far shorter than NVIDIA’s GeForce GTX 285, which is 10.5” long in stock form.
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OC’ed Speeds
Like all Toxic boards, Sapphire overclocks the 5850 Toxic from the factory. While the Radeon 5850 runs at 725MHz core/1000MHz memory in stock form, Sapphire’s Toxic 5850 is clocked at 765MHz core/1125MHz memory. This is an improvement of 5% and 11% on the graphics core and memory and makes the board one of the fastest 5850 cards on the market in terms of clock speeds.
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| System Setup | Page:: ( 3 / 12 ) |
Intel Core i7-870
ASUS P7P55D Deluxe
4GB (2x2GB) OCZ Reaper HPC 1600 @ DDR-1333 Speeds
NVIDIA GeForce GTX 275
NVIDIA GeForce GTX 285
ForceWare 196.34
ATI Radeon HD 5870
ATI Radeon HD 5850
Sapphire Radeon 5850 Toxic
Catalyst 10.1
2TB Seagate Barracuda XT
Microsoft Windows 7 Ultimate 64-bit
Benchmarks
Call of Duty: Modern Warfare 2 Max Settings
Crysis DX10 High Settings GPU Benchmark
Far Cry 2 DX10 Ultra High Settings, Small Ranch benchmark
STALKER Call of Pripyat Benchmark Extreme Settings, Ultra HDAO Night sequence
Batman: Arkham Asylum Highest Settings
Resident Evil 5 Highest Settings
| Modern Warfare 2 | Page:: ( 4 / 12 ) |
CoD: MW2 – DirectX 9
| Crysis DX10 | Page:: ( 5 / 12 ) |
Crysis – DirectX 10
| Far Cry 2 | Page:: ( 6 / 12 ) |
Far Cry 2 – DirectX 10
| Resident Evil 5 | Page:: ( 7 / 12 ) |
Resident Evil – DirectX 10
| Batman: Arkham Asylum | Page:: ( 8 / 12 ) |
Batman:AA – DirectX 9
| STALKER Call of Pripyat | Page:: ( 9 / 12 ) |
STALKER – DirectX 10/11
| Temps and Overclocking | Page:: ( 10 / 12 ) |
Temp Testing
Overclocking
| Ballistics Report | Page:: ( 11 / 12 ) |
Pros
Vapor Chamber Cooling: Sapphire’s vapor chamber cooler did a tremendous job of cooling ATI’s RV870 chip while also generating very little noise. Despite the fact that the board is OC’ed to 765MHz, the 5850 Toxic ran 7 degrees Celsius cooler than the stock Radeon 5850 at load, and 8 degrees cooler at idle.
Equally impressive is that the board managed to do this while running nearly silent. Sapphire claims that their cooler runs 10dB quieter than ATI’s reference design, and based on our experience with the 5850 Toxic, we believe these claims. While our 5850 reference board generated up to 49.6dB of noise at load, we couldn’t get a reading with our Extech sound level meter at a distance of 6”. Our meter goes down to 40dB, so the Sapphire board was generating less than 40 decibels of noise under load.
OC’ed clocks: To improve the card’s performance, Sapphire ups the Toxic clock speeds pretty dramatically over the stock Radeon 5850 specifications. The card’s graphics core runs at 765MHz – that’s 40MHz higher than 5850’s stock speed of 725MHz. Meanwhile, the board’s memory is OC’ed even further, Sapphire clocks the board’s memory at 1125MHz. In stock form, the Radeon 5850’s memory subsystem runs at 1000MHz, so Sapphire OCs the memory 11%.
The 5850 Toxic ran 6% faster than the stock Radeon 5850 in most games, including Crysis, STALKER, and Far Cry 2. This actually pushed the Toxic board ahead of NVIDIA’s GeForce GTX 285 in Modern Warfare 2, which is a game engine which has traditionally favored GeForce hardware.
Pricing: Officially, Sapphire says the Radeon 5850 Toxic Edition carries an MSRP of $319. Looking at online pricing though, the card currently sells for $20 more, with Newegg selling it today for $339.99. Even at the $340 price tag though, the card is still a solid value.
Consider that a bone stock Radeon 5850 will run you about $290-$310. OC’ed 5850 cards start around $300 and quickly go up from there.
Now if you were to go out and buy an aftermarket 5850 cooler, you’d have to spend another $40-$50 minimum. In the process, you’ll void your card’s warranty, and you may or may not get the cooling performance with low noise levels that Sapphire offers out-of-the-box with their 5850 Toxic.
If you do think $340 is too much to spend on a 5850 card, Sapphire will also offer the Radeon 5850 Vapor-X. The Vapor-X board will ship with the same cooler as the Toxic board we’re reviewing today, only it will run at lower clock speeds.
Cons
Limited stock OC’ing options in Overdrive: Because Sapphire OCs the card so far from the factory, you’re limited to OC’ing the graphics core just 10MHz in Overdrive, while the memory can’t be OC’ed at all with ATI Overdrive.
As a result, you’ll have to turn to a third-party utility like AMD’s own GPU Clock Tool or MSI’s Afterburner software.
It would be nice if Sapphire would provide their own tool for OC’ing the Toxic board either in the box or on the Sapphire website, or simply worked with ATI to offer more options for OC’ing in the Overdrive control panel (as ASUS has done with their Voltage Tweak boards).
Say goodbye to the DiRT 2 game bundle: Many of ATI’s board partners were providing vouchers to download DiRT 2 with their first wave of Radeon 5850 and 5870 cards launched last year. However, it now appears that few, if any cards offered at retail ship with these vouchers anymore. This includes Sapphire’s 5850 Toxic.
| Final Verdict | Page:: ( 12 / 12 ) |
FiringSquad says:
In terms of temps, the 5850 Toxic ran 7-8 degrees cooler than the stock ATI cooler in our testing. Temps were under 60 degrees Celsius at load.
This is simply an incredible feat of engineering from Sapphire: the Toxic board runs cooler and quieter than the stock Radeon 5850 while also delivering more performance..
As we just mentioned, the 5850 Toxic is able to pull this off even though it’s overclocked from the factory to run at higher speeds than ATI’s reference design. Sapphire OCs the board to run at 765MHz core, that’s 5% higher than ATI’s specifications. The more dramatic OC is on the board’s memory. Here Sapphire runs the 5850 Toxic’s memory speed at 1125MHz – 125MHz higher than stock.
The 5850 Toxic’s PCB is slightly longer than ATI’s reference board, but we don’t think this will be an issue for many of you. The card is a little over half an inch longer than the reference design, measuring 10.1” from end to end.
The extra performance and cooling does literally come at a cost though – Sapphire’s 5850 Toxic sells for $340 on Newegg, making it tied with XFX’s 5850 Black Edition as the most expensive 5850 offering on the site. Clearly you get what you pay for, as an aftermarket cooler will set you back at least $40, which would put you right around the Toxic board’s pricing and void your warranty in the process. Sapphire will also be releasing a 5850 Vapor-X if you want to save a little money.
If you can afford to fork over the cash though, you’d be hard-pressed to beat Sapphire’s 5850 Toxic. As far as Radeon 5850 cards go, it doesn’t get any better than this at the moment.