Sapphire HD 5870 2GB Toxic Edition Review Comment Thread

[SKYMTL]

When ATI's HD 5870 was released back in September of 2009, the architecture impressed us with its versatility and performance. Now, board partners are well on their way to refining these cards in order to squeeze increased performance out their efficient forms by increasing clock speeds and adding additional memory. In this review we take a look at the Sapphire HD 5870 2GB Toxic which promises to push ATI's technology to extremes.


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[bojangles]

AHHHH...avatar change!

Didn't really seem like memory had a performance improvement at all. It was mostly the clock speed bump that helped. It is a pretty awesome card considering the cooling it has.

Perhaps a special Eyefinity/multi-monitor review is coming up to see if memory really helps?

[SKYMTL]

I'm waiting for another sale on that Dell 30" then we'll have some Eyefinity testing.

And yes there was an avatar change. Just through no choice of mine; it was an unfortunate April Fool's joke gone awry.

[Arinoth]

Hmm could this mean a regular ATI 5870 may give more of a fight against a gtx 480 if one is able to overclock it a decent amount as it seems the added memory doesn't add that much to non-eyefininty set ups

[Delavan]

Nice review SKY,
I particularly liked the pre-Toxic part of the review (applicable to all brands/versions of the HD5870)

Humm...
Do we know why the latest HD5870 offerings aren't great overclockers? SkyMTL pointed out at those 5870 owners bragging about their 1GHz core clocks OCs. I seen that on some OC forums as well. How come less and less cards are reaching that 1GHz core clock barrier? Did the manufacturers changed some components for lesser quality ones??? Or is it just that the card is already pushed to the limit?

Are all the current "reference design" HD5870's are worst OCers that early batches, or it is only certain brands?

[_dangtx_]

time to skim tru some graphs!!!


ok...so the extra gig of ram doesnt do much unless you hook up 2+ screens?
power consumption is still ok, temps are fabulous.

[Soultribunal]

Originally Posted by SKYMTL

I'm waiting for another sale on that Dell 30" then we'll have some Eyefinity testing.

And yes there was an avatar change. Just through no choice of mine; it was an unfortunate April Fool's joke gone awry.

Oh it didn't go that Awry .

Its all FiXT now anyways. Liking the Toxic, they are an interesting breed of card for sure.

ST

[bojangles]

Originally Posted by Soultribunal

Oh it didn't go that Awry .

Definitely didn't go awry. It caught me offguard! Didn't think it was you the first time I saw it.

I think it worked .

[SKYMTL]

Originally Posted by Delavan

Do we know why the latest HD5870 offerings aren't great overclockers? SkyMTL pointed out at those 5870 owners bragging about their 1GHz core clocks OCs. I seen that on some OC forums as well. How come less and less cards are reaching that 1GHz core clock barrier? Did the manufacturers changed some components for lesser quality ones??? Or is it just that the card is already pushed to the limit?

It is quite simple actually. As any manufacturing process matures, some changes are implemented that will do a number of things from lowering power consumption to allowing less voltage to be used to any number of things. Sometimes this benefits overclocking (such as later models of the Q6600) while other times it hurts. That being said, overclocking is an inexact science and I am sure that a ton of HD 5870 cards can and will meet that magical 1Ghz mark without much increase in vCore.

HOWEVER, every single board partner I have talked to has stated that overall overclocking potential of the new production runs has decreased. As such, many were planning on cards being released with 1Ghz core clocks (Gigabyte was actually aiming for 1.1Ghz on their Super Overclock) but had to scale things back because of lower yields of chips that could actually be pushed that far with a reasonable amount of voltage.

This is actually significant since all of these higher clocked cards will have production runs of less than 10,000 units (on average) which means some serious binning to begin with. If a stringent binning process cannot sort out enough 975Mhz+ capable cores to justify launching a card with relatively broad initial availability, it doesn't really bode well for consumer overclocking either.

Are all the current "reference design" HD5870's are worst OCers that early batches, or it is only certain brands?

Not at all. As I said: ON AVERAGE. You could get a card that won't overclock well while another brand new HD 5870 will overclock like crazy. It all comes down to the luck of the draw but from what we have been told, newer production runs will be more likely to yield sub-1Ghz clocking parts than older ones.

[Delavan]

If a stringent binning process cannot sort out enough 975Mhz+ capable cores to justify launching a card with relatively broad initial availability, it doesn't really bode well for consumer overclocking either.

Well said. Alright. Good 'Ol luck of the draw. Just like when I ordered my Q9550. Got a C1. Fine CPU, but not OCing as high as a E0.

Hopefully my XFX HD5870 (coming-in tomorrow) will like a little OC. That being said, OCing these cards doesn't seems to lead to great performance increase.
From "vanilla" HD5870 to HD5870 Toxic overclocked, a 6-8 FPS increase.