Sapphire Radeon HD 5850 Toxic

[PAGETITLE=Introduction][Top Ad] Over the course of the past month, we've taken a good look at a handful of budget graphics cards offerings. In the middle of January, we checked out AMD's $100 Radeon HD 5670, and then we quickly followed-up with a look at NVIDIA's three lowest-end offerings. Not too long after, AMD tossed even more models our way; the under-$100 Radeon HD 5450 and HD 5570. In case it isn't obvious, that's a lot of budget offerings to take a look at in a single month. So what am I getting at? Well, when I received a package from Sapphire and found the Radeon HD 5850 Toxic inside, I had a major sigh of relief. After taking a look at all those budget graphics cards, here I had a special version of one of my current favorites. At around ~$300, the HD 5850 is one sweet card, able to power all of today's games at the highest resolutions, even with anti-aliasing enabled. Ahh, the power! After taking the Toxic card out of the box, I wasn't quite sure what to think. With its "Toxic" moniker, it's clearly a special edition, of sorts, but aesthetically, it didn't look much different than a reference offering. The cooler design itself differs to a small degree, but the actual shape is almost spot-on. So what's the deal? Toxic is merely Sapphire's term for its pre-overclocked line-up. Unlike the Vapor-X models, Toxic cards don't have a major emphasis on cooling performance. This isn't a problem, but for those using a graphics card in a tighter enclosure, the improved cooling performance of a Vapor-X is highly recommended by us. We've taken a look at several Vapor-X models over the past year, and each one has greatly impressed us with its performance. With its 765MHz Core (+40MHz over reference) and 1125MHz Memory (+125MHz), it's clear that the Toxic version can make a rather stark performance difference over the reference card. But as we'll see later in the article, these pre-defined clocks are a little modest, as the card has quite a bit of breathing room, and almost has the ability to bring us close to HD 5870 territory. Before we take a look at the Toxic, let's review the current line-up from AMD. All of the models listed in the table below are current-gen, so all support the things we've come to like about the HD 5000-series, such as DirectX 11 and Eyefinity. Currently, the only model we can't talk about much is the HD 5830, but you'll learn a lot more about that next week. Also in the weeks to come, we'll see an Eyefinity-edition HD 5870, but I probably don't have to explain its purpose. Model Core MHz Mem MHz Memory Bus Width Processors Radeon HD 5970 725 1000 2048MB 256-bit 1600 x 2 Radeon HD 5870 850 1200 1024MB 256-bit 1600 Radeon HD 5850 725 1000 1024MB 256-bit 1440 Radeon HD 5830 ??? ??? ???MB ???-bit ??? Radeon HD 5770 850 1200 1024MB 128-bit 800 Radeon HD 5750 700 1150 512MB - 1GB 128-bit 720 Radeon HD 5670 775 1000 512MB - 1GB 128-bit 400 Radeon HD 5570 650 900 512MB - 1GB 128-bit 400 Radeon HD 5450 650 800 512MB - 1GB 64-bit 80 Although the Toxic card features an almost identical chassis design to the reference card, the big difference is that it uses a special fan, which happens to be exposed, for increased airflow. This cooler design isn't what I'd consider fascinating, but it is a modest improvement over the reference, and should help us reach higher clocks when overclocking. I personally can't say I'm a fan of the blue/black design going on here, but that's more of a personal opinion, and matters little in the grand scheme of things. Most HD 5000-series cards to date have included DisplayPort, HDMI and dual DVI-D connections, and the HD 5850 Toxic is no exception. Right out of the box, you can hook up to 3 displays with a 2560x1600 resolution on each. If you do go that route, I'd recommend not reading our site at 12 megapixel... it doesn't look quite so good. As a high-end card, you wouldn't expect less than 2 x PCI-E power connectors, and that's just what we see here. In this photo, you can see another small difference between this cooler and the reference. While the reference is mostly closed off at the end (with breathing holes), Sapphire's Toxic is a bit more open. Before we hit up our results, the next page will cover both our test system specs and our methodologies. If you've never looked through those before, I recommend it. After that, we'll dive right into our look at Modern Warfare 2 performance. [PAGEBREAK][PAGETITLE=Test System & Methodology] At Techgage, we strive to make sure our results are as accurate as possible. Our testing is rigorous and time-consuming, but we feel the effort is worth it. In an attempt to leave no question unanswered, this page contains not only our testbed specifications, but also a fully-detailed look at how we conduct our testing. For an exhaustive look at our methodologies, even down to the Windows Vista installation, please refer to this article. Test Machine. The below table lists our testing machine's hardware, which remains unchanged throughout all GPU testing, minus the graphics card. Each card used for comparison is also listed here, along with the driver version used. Each one of the URLs in this table can be clicked to view the respective review of that product, or if a review doesn't exist, it will bring you to the product on the manufacturer's website. Component Model Processor Intel Core i7-975 Extreme Edition - Quad-Core, 3.33GHz, 1.33v Motherboard Gigabyte GA-EX58-EXTREME - X58-based, F7 BIOS (05/11/09) Memory Corsair DOMINATOR - DDR3-1333 7-7-7-24-1T, 1.60 ATI Graphics Radeon HD 5870 1GB (Sapphire) - Catalyst 9.10 Radeon HD 5850 1GB (Sapphire Toxic) - Catalyst 10.2 Radeon HD 5850 1GB (ASUS) - Catalyst 9.10 Radeon HD 5770 1GB (Reference) - Beta Catalyst (10/06/09) Radeon HD 5750 1GB (Sapphire) - Catalyst 9.11 Radeon HD 5670 512MB (Reference) - Beta Catalyst (12/16/09) Radeon HD 5570 1GB (Sapphire) - Beta Catalyst (12/11/09) NVIDIA Graphics GeForce GTX 295 1792MB (Reference) - GeForce 186.18 GeForce GTX 285 1GB (EVGA) - GeForce 186.18 GeForce GTX 275 896MB (Reference) - GeForce 186.18 GeForce GTX 260 896MB (XFX) - GeForce 186.18 GeForce GTS 250 1GB (EVGA) - GeForce 186.18 GeForce GT 240 512MB (ASUS) - GeForce 196.21 Audio On-Board Audio Storage Seagate Barracuda 500GB 7200.11 Power Supply Corsair HX1000W Chassis SilverStone TJ10 Full-Tower Display Gateway XHD3000 30" Cooling Thermalright TRUE Black 120 Et cetera Windows Vista Ultimate 64-bit When preparing our testbeds for any type of performance testing, we follow these guidelines: General Guidelines No power-saving options are enabled in the motherboard's BIOS. Internet is disabled. No Virus Scanner or Firewall is installed. The OS is kept clean; no scrap files are left in between runs. Hard drives affected are defragged with PerfectDisk 10 prior to a fresh benchmarking run. Machine has proper airflow and the room temperature is 80°F (27°C) or less. To aide with the goal of keeping accurate and repeatable results, we alter certain services in Windows Vista from starting up at boot. This is due to the fact that these services have the tendency to start up in the background without notice, potentially causing slightly inaccurate results. Disabling "Windows Search" turns off the OS' indexing which can at times utilize the hard drive and memory more than we'd like. Services Disabled Prior to Benchmarking PerfectDisk 10. Windows Defender. Windows Error Reporting Service. Windows Event Log. Windows Firewall. Windows Search. Windows Update. For more robust information on how we tweak Windows, please refer once again to this article. Game Titles. At this time, we currently benchmark all of our games using three popular resolutions: 1680x1050, 1920x1080 and also 2560x1600. 1680x1050 was chosen as it's one of the most popular resolutions for gamers sporting ~20" displays. 1920x1080 might stand out, since we've always used 1920x1200 in the past, but we didn't make this change without some serious thought. After taking a look at the current landscape for desktop monitors around ~24", we noticed that 1920x1200 is definitely on the way out, as more and more models are coming out as native 1080p. It's for this reason that we chose it. Finally, for high-end gamers, we also benchmark using 2560x1600, a resolution that's just about 2x 1080p. For graphics cards that include less than 1GB of GDDR, we omit Grand Theft Auto IV from our testing, as our chosen detail settings require at least 800MB of available graphics memory. Also, if the card we're benchmarking doesn't offer the performance to handle 2560x1600 across most of our titles reliably, only 1680x1050 and 1920x1080 will be utilized. Because we value results generated by real-world testing, we don't utilize timedemos whatsoever. The possible exception might be Futuremark's 3DMark Vantage. Though it's not a game, it essentially acts as a robust timedemo. We choose to use it as it's a standard where GPU reviews are concerned, and we don't want to rid our readers of results they expect to see. All of our results are captured with the help of Beepa's FRAPS 2.98, while stress-testing and temperature-monitoring is handled by OCCT 3.1.0 and GPU-Z, respectively. Call of Duty: Modern Warfare 2. Call of Juarez: Bound in Blood. Crysis Warhead. F.E.A.R. 2: Project Origin. Grand Theft Auto IV. Race Driver: GRID. World in Conflict: Soviet Assault. [PAGEBREAK][PAGETITLE=Call of Duty: Modern Warfare 2] When the original Call of Duty game launched in 2003, Infinity Ward was an unknown. Naturally... it was the company's first title. But since then, the series and company alike have become household names. Not only has the series delivered consistently incredible gameplay, it's pushed the graphics envelope with each successive release, and where Modern Warfare is concerned, it's also had a rich storyline. The first two titles might have been built on the already-outdated Quake III engine, but since then, the games have been built with improved graphical...

Sapphire Radeon HD 5850 Toxic

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Rob Williams