News Headlines
- Wed, Jun 19
- Microsoft officially canceling Xbox One online and used game policies across the board
- Nintendo wins appeal over Wii Fit Balance Board patent litigation, probably not over
- Bethesda's VP of PR Pete Hines elaborates on the likely dismal situation with Prey 2
- The Bureau: XCOM Declassified's narrative-driven DLC detailed, game still two months away from launch
- Nintendo dives into free-to-play with new Steel Diver
New Articles
Related Articles
Box and bundle
The Sapphire HD 5850 Toxic comes in a box that features what looks to be the Silver Surfer on the front, having recently escaped the auspices of some sort of space cult. Badges advertising the best features of the HD 5850 Toxic adorn the English-only box.
As for the bundle, you get a bunch of things, including: two PCIE power adapters, a driver CD, a CrossFire bridge, a DVI-VGA adapter, a nice big manual, and ArcSoft's SimHD program. This program does some fancy tricks and up-samples standard videos to give them a better look -- a 'sim' high-definition appearance.
This bundle is very complete, as bundles go.
Overclocking
No video card review is complete without some overclock testing -- even the card is already overclocked!
The HD 5850 is positioned to be a good candidate for overclocking, as optimists might hope -- especially thrifty optimists -- that with a bit of work they might be able to get something just about on par as the top single-GPU HD 5870, while saving a significant chunk of change in the process.
Our overclocking adventures with the HD 5850 Toxic went well. We maxed out at a very nice 880 MHz / 1234 clock speed. Using advice from our sister site Overclockers Club, we used a combination of the ATI GPU Clock Tool working in conjunction with MSI's excellent Afterburner overclocking tool to manually adjust the fan speed to 100%.
This 'double overclock' transforms the HD 5850 Toxic into a significant step above a default HD 5850, which runs at 725 / 1000. This is about a 20.5% overclock over the standard clock, which is enough to make this video card eligible for Neoseeker's Overclocker's Award. Generally speaking, for video cards, 5%-7% OC of the core is about average, 11%-15% is really good, and over 15% is great.
We don't recommend running the Toxic at this speed though -- the fan running at 100% is a bit loud, for starters. Though you should be able to feel pretty safe running the Toxic HD 5850 at about 850 / 1176, with the fan on auto -- which is great.
To be fair to other companies though, the HD 5850 is just generally a solid overclocker's choice, and even standard designs have been known to run smoothly over 850 MHz. Nonetheless, if you want to OC something, the Toxic is a good choice.
Article Index |
|