Sapphire HD 5850 Toxic Quiet card with great performance

Author: Jouni 'Jipa' Vasama Published: 11.05.2010 Manufacturer: Sapphire Product Group: Graphics cards In English Suomeksi

Power Consumption & Temperatures

As always, for power consumption we measured the wattage of the whole test bench, and for load temperatures we used Furmark to really stress the card. I still keep getting impressed by the huge improvements on the idle power consumption on these new HD 5-series cards! The old 4870 and 4890 were notoriously power thirsty even when not loaded and drew over 70 watts of power when idling. This drop in power usage has ofcourse also led to a drop in temperatures, with the idle temperature being very reasonable 40°C and load hardly exceeding 70°C. When overclocked with the AMD GPU Clock Tool the idle power consumption shoots up by over 30 watts, because the card no longer clocks itself down.

Noise

As for the noise, Sapphire uses their own cooler on this Toxic-series card and the large axial fan on the cooler remained very quiet throughout the testing. For a card as fast as this the cooler seems very good indeed.

Conclusion PROS  Cooler Will fit most cases Overclocking CONS  - Gold Award! So then, what's the conclusion after all the testing? The Sapphire HD 5850 Toxic performed great in our tests, not only on the performance tests, but also on noise analysis. It also proved to be a beastly overclocker and we could push the already upped stock speeds further up by 85 MHz on the core and 75 MHz memories. These give even more value to the card. Factory overclocked cards with enhanced coolers always come at a price premium, and the Sapphire HD 5850 Toxic is no exception. That said, it's in line with other similar cards and definitely offers added value over the stock cards.

Additional Information

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