The AMD ATI Radeon Sapphire Toxic HD 5850 brings a new era for increased level-enthusiasts to ramp up their gaming platforms to Microsoft’s DirectX 11 specification, while maintaining the core platform compatibility to use DVI-D, DVI-I, and finally HDMI for newer LCD monitors. The launch of the Radeon 5000 series has brought with it a change for consumers to meet not only a great price point, but benefit with the core integration of having features such as 1440 stream processors for every GFLOP unit and much more. Incredible design aside of the Toxic HD 5850, the AMD GPU launch of this latest card definitely quenches the thirst for a handful of enthusiasts from overclocking especially to pure stability per MHz increased.

The AMD ATI Radeon Sapphire Toxic HD 5850 looks incredible than the standard reference cards with a Cypress chipcore that is sleek and integrated on the main board. AMD ATI Radeon Sapphire Toxic HD 5850’s comes packed with 1 GB GDDR5 memory, heralded by the 4800 series, and packs 1 gigabyte and over 2 TeraFLOPs of processing power to give an enhanced edge on a 256-bit bus width. The Toxic is naturally overclocked to 765MHz / 1125MHz and Sapphire will be launching the Vapor-X model elsewhere in Europe. One of the best features of design for the ATI Radeon Sapphire Toxic HD 5850 is the cooler, which is a well-done cooler that is quieter than the standard heat pipe arrangement.  Compared to reference coolers, the ATI Radeon Sapphire Toxic HD 5850 cooler has a bimodal air distribution as the air goes through the front and rear of the card and not all out from the back, thereby dissipating the heat much more efficiently. The open-ended design makes cooling more efficient than having a fan behind the card for increased cooling.  The ATI Radeon Sapphire Toxic HD 5850 is definitely a greater card than the AMD reference cards for this line.

ATI Radeon Sapphire Toxic HD 5850 becomes a strong overclocking card with the OC label at the top of the box. With no toolset for overvolting, the volts remained at 1.088v. Using the AMD GPU Clock Toolset, we overclocked this to 145MHz on the core clock frequency and pushed an extra 80MHz on the VRAM frequency to 1195MHz. These overclocks are already in addition to the Toxic card default overclock set, which causes the games to be incredibly fast. The stability and quality of overclocking with the AMD ATI Radeon Sapphire Toxic HD 5850 is simply incredible for the price.

Power consumption efficiency in the Toxic 5530 is also incredibly well done.  The Toxic at 895MHz/1195MHz only adds a mere 25W and is still under the reference specifications released by AMD. In addition to great overclocking, the ATI Radeon Sapphire Toxic HD 5850 has very light decibel load to only 6 dB for sound at full-load while idle and maximum temperatures go from 36 degrees Celsius to 74 degrees.

The ATI Radeon Sapphire Toxic HD 5850 is simply an incredible buy for consumers looking to get the Cypress chip power with DirectX 11 support, Eyefinity power for multi-display processing, incredible overclocking and HDMI onboard output for an incredible power suite on a card that is ingenious as much as it is stable and prurient to enthusiast needs. What sort of release AMD is planning past the AMD ATI Radeon 5970 chipset is still to be seen and remains very promising.

Back when we did our review on the Crossfire 4870’s, we were left utterly impressed by the sheer amount of productivity and results that provided for an effulgence of gaming pleasure over even the latest of the Nvidia offering of the GTX 280’s and GTX 260’s with value of power and price. It seems AMD is setting the barriers this generation, and trying to cross them over and over again. With the introduction of the HD 4850 1GB and HD 4870 1GB, AMD had amped up the offering for the initial consumer price point models. Now, they’ve just broken their own barrier with the latest innovation of the ATI Radeon HD 4870 X2 series. As the first consumer graphics card with 2 GB of memory, and the first card to implement a 512bit GDDR5 memory architecture through the inordinate amount of pixel pipelines, the ATI Radeon HD 4870 X2 graphics card stoically dominates the competition in a whole new level for the enthusiast gamers.

We wanted to make something people can love, and feel secure with. – Dirk Meyer, President, AMD: Commenting to WhatIfGaming on the HD 4870 X2 card.

The Radeon 4800 series has many people excited since we published our review on the 4850 to our in-depth exclusive reveal first on the 4870. Now, today we bring a review on the 4870 with dual goodness. That’s right. We have 2 of these powerhouses from AMD, which reveals the introduction of the highly desirable and now most successful GDDR5 memory architecture. A complete power machine, the ATI Radeon 4870 is the most valuable card to date in terms of the Radeon evolution and Ruby keeps looking sexier by the minute. Stable temperatures, amazing performance on all DX 10.1 games with many XGA resolutions, make not only a very formidable card series in general, but a great contender as the 4870 and one that is set out to win against the competition this time around.

AMD is proudly bringing PC gamers 1.0 TeraFLOP Graphics Performance, with a single GPU that consumes only 110W of power in the HD 4850. Going head to head with the 8800GTX, 8800GTS & GT, and 9600GT series of cards. Developing a new TeraScale graphics engine, AMD is excited to deliver an impassive experience for gaming. With enhanced anti-aliasing 24X (AA) and AF, gamers will find a new realism more improved than previous versions of cards that all had AA and AF flickering sporadic problems. You’ve read our Cinema 2.0 coverage and are waiting for our detailed article on the latest 4800 series line, including ATI Radeon HD 4870 details. Now, we want to reveal one part with the ATI Radeon HD 4850 that should provide a glimpse into the new series line. With power that supports DX 10.1 fully unlike the GTX 200’s, the ATI Radeon HD 4850 brings efficiency together against the competition through features such as ATI Powerplay and ATI Avivo HD to give gamers a more enhanced experience all around.

Let’s take a look at the key features:

• 512MB GDDR3 Memory

• Core Clock: 625MHz

• Single Slot

• 2.0 Gbps
• 110W Power Requirement
• 256-bit memory interface
• DirectX 10.1 Support
• 24x custom filter AA and high performance AF
• ATI CrossFireX multi-GPU support for scalable performance
• PCI-E 2.0 support
• ATI Avivio HD video and display technology for Blu-ray and 7.1 surround sound support with On-Chip HDCPd
• ATI Powerplay

Let’s go on to the test system.

The 8800 GTX has represented the most powerful graphics card that sane people were willing to buy for years. The 8800 Ultra is slightly faster, but at a cost of over $600 it is reserved for those with gross amounts of disposable income. From the start, we were able to run SLI ATX and get incredible performance. Nowadays the GTX is starting to become long in the tooth as far as graphics cards go, 15 months is a very long time with nothing faster to come along. The latest games are certainly pushing even a pair of GTX’s to unplayable levels at higher resolutions. So what are we owners of 30” LCD monitors to do to get playable frames at our native resolution? Enter 3-way SLI, a fully functional and much sorted extension of the Quad SLI. NVIDIA has been hard at work on multi-GPU performance and with the limitation of only 3fps pre-render in Direct X9 and below out of the way in Direct X10, the stage is set for extremely expensive graphics solutions. For those who do not remember, Quad SLI was plagued by the fact that for the money, it was a horrible investment. It offered very marginal performance benefits in all but a select few applications and thus never adopted as the true high-end solution.

Today we will be seeing how far the technology has come along as well as what it requires to get this level of performance. Triple SLI looks great on paper, check that, it looks good on paper as long as you’re not referring to the green sheets in your wallet. The requirements are an NVIDIA SLI certified motherboard with 3 16x PCI-E slots, currently consists of either a 680i, or 780i motherboard, which round out Intel based offerings. The ill-fated AMD 4×4 platforms should also support it provided you can get an SLI adaptor that will work with the spacing. None of these boards is below the price of $200 until you cash in the mail-in-rebate. So, time to pop out the 780i for this baby, as we have yet to receive the latest 790i (more on that later).

The test setup consists of a QX9770 and stock coolers to maintain it all. For this example, we ran the core benchmark of the game you all most wanted to know about—Crysis.

Click to zoom in

SLI overall added tremendous playability, but tri-SLI expanded upon it. NVIDIA’s 3-way SLI indeed works simply put. The problem however is that in this instance it is based on technology that is approaching the end of its life. The 8800 GTX and Ultra have all but been replaced by the 8800 GTS 512MB and the 9000 series cards have launched. The Quad SLI launch of the 9800GX2 should undercut the cost of either Triple GTX’s or Ultra’s and perform on par or better. So really the only way this is going to be of benefit to anyone is if you’ve already got a 680i or 780i and a pair of GTX’s or Ultra’s.

Today we are testing the new ASUS EAH3850 TOP and EN8800GS TOP graphics cards in a head to head comparison. These $200 US graphics cards deliver serious performance and come with overclocked factory settings, and improved cooling solutions. We expect more from GPU manufacturers this time around. The most recent card we have with us today is the GeForce 9600 GT, which tunes in great. But alas, there is tons of competition on the other brim as the HD 3850 and 3870 graphics cards have also been able to remain very competitive. Currently the Radeon HD 3870 is priced between $190-$200 US while the GeForce 9600 GT costs roughly $170-$180 US, and both produce very similar results.

With everything to boot, the Radeon HD 3850 happens to feature an improved design and factory overclocking. The ASUS EAH3850 TOP/G/HTDI/512M/A looks as though it is the best Radeon HD 3850 graphics card we have seen to date, but this enhanced ASUS version doesn’t come cheap. The EAH3850 TOP is no ordinary Radeon HD 3850 graphics card, featuring high speed 0.8ns GDDR3 memory clocked at 1.9GHz, along with a heavily overclocked core and an improved cooling design. The default Radeon HD 3850 specifications include 1656MHz memory and a 668MHz core frequency. ASUS smacked on their big boots and has boosted the core frequency by 9%, as the EAH3850 TOP comes clocked at 730MHz. The memory frequency has boosted by 15% which will also improve the performance of this Radeon HD 3850 graphics card, giving customers the largest bang for their buck. ASUS also designed a custom cooler for the EAH3850 TOP, which not only performs better than the standard single slot cooler, but is quieter as well. Unlike the standard reference cooler, the ASUS “Glaciator” fan and heatsink combo does not accommodate for the eight memory chips that are clocked at 1900MHz. Luckily, there is a cooler over the circuitry. So props to them for that. The EAH3850 TOP measures 21cm long by 9.7cm tall, 2cm shorter than the Radeon HD 3870 and GeForce 8800 GT graphics cards. In the package ASUS has included a D-Sub adapter and a HDMI adapter, while the card supports dual DVI out and a TV output (S-Video to Composite) onboard. It also supports HDCP and HDTV, and comes with an HDTV-out cable, which is handy for you capture freaks out there that don’t think TiVo is a great option.

Just like the EAH3850 TOP, the EN8800GS TOP features an improved cooling design with overclocked settings for the core and memory. The GeForce 8800 GS is designed to operate at 550MHz, while the GDDR3 memory specification is 1.6GHz. Once again ASUS has boosted the core speed by 9% reaching 600MHz, while the memory frequency has been increased by just 6.25% reaching 1.7GHz. ASUS clarifies that this overclock will allow their GeForce 8800 GS graphics card to produce over 10,000pts in 3Dmark06. Not a bad deal at all. Since the GeForce 8800 GS supports just 384MB of memory, there are just six chips onboard. Known as the Hynix HY5RS123235B FP-11 chips, they are designed to operate at 1.8GHz according to Hynix, which is surprising given that ASUS is only running them at 1.7GHz on the EN8800GS TOP. So, it becomes interesting to see how much further the EN8800GS TOP is pushed before stability becomes an issue.

Our featured benchmark is Crysis for this card. We’ll let the pictures do all the talking.

Overall the EAH3850 TOP took lead by 20%, which equates to 3 fps. Not really worth the extra blow of cash, but it does what it says.

Here, again the TOP takes lead while the GS falls behind.

What next? Time to overclock the puppies to see the big difference in core stability.

The ASUS EN8800GS TOP core overclocked, definitely. Just not what we hoped as it reached 2.17GHz. Not bad, but not that amazing given the core features. The ASUS EAH3850 TOP is limited by the Catalyst drivers that capped at 790MHz for the core. Damn. We discovered the reason a bit after, and found the EAH3850 TOP to overclock pass the 840MHz core speed.

Both graphics cards are impressive, as both make use of the ASUS Glaciator fan and heatsink, while the EAH3850 TOP sits on a nice red PCB the EN8800GS TOP gets a blue PCB. There is nothing remotely generic about these two products including the price. But, the winner by far is the EAH3850 TOP on this one.

The ECS N8800GT-256MX is a perfect card for those looking at bang for the buck. It appears to be a reference 8800 GT with a different heat sink, but it isn’t. The test system was running Windows Vista Ultimate 32-bit with all available Microsoft updates including the hotfixes required for enthusiast video cards to run correctly. NVIDIA Forceware 169.28 beta drivers were used on all of the GeForce 8800 series graphics cards, and 174.74 used for the 9800 GTX (174.74 drivers will not install on the GeForce 8800 GTX series). ATI Catalyst 8.3 drivers were used for all ATI cards. All results shown in the charts are averages of at least three runs from each game or application used. Memory timings were set to 1000MHz 4-5-4-15. The XFX GeForce 8800 GTX were standard models and the GeForce 8800 GTS were the Palit 1GB Sonic SLI Video Cards.

Sandra: 112,323,322 Results. (No graph on this one)

Overall speaking of performing well, the heat sink/fan combo are great. I was impressed with how quiet it was at idle and full load, never getting above a whisper. The cooling provided at these low noise levels was stellar, keeping load temperatures below 60c which is a task the reference heatsink is not up to.

The ATI Radeon HD 3650 is the direct replacement for the ATI Radeon HD 2600 Pro as you can tell. The ATI Radeon HD 3650 is active cooled with a core clock of 725MHz and a memory clock of 800MHz and will be available with two kinds of memory ICs – GDDR3 and GDDR2. The slower and older GDDR2 memory chips will be used on the $79 price point cards, while the $99 cards will feature faster GDDR3 memory ICs. The reference Radeon HD 3650 that we have today uses GDDR3 memory IC’s, so it is the $99 card. The faster clock speed and memory frequencies improve the memory bandwidth and math processing rate on the Radeon HD 3650 when compared to the older Radeon HD 2600 Pro. Also keep in mind that both the Radeon 3400 series and 3600 series are PCI Express 2.0 compliant and support DirectX 10.1 features as well as ATI PowerPlay software.

LightsMark Demo Results:

Lightsmark 2007 v1.3 showed the ATI Radeon HD 3650 doing pretty well against the ATI Radeon 3850 256MB and was able to turn in good numbers at even 1920×1200. The Sapphire Radeon HD 3450 needs more muscle to break 30FPS, but it was close.

The ATI Radeon HD 3650 and Radeon HD 3450 didn’t turn in great benchmark results, but at $49-$99 these are entry level cards and aren’t supposed to be geared at hard-core gamers. At lower resoltions with low quality settings they will easily play older DirectX 9 games, but as you saw in the S.T.A.L.K.E.R. benchmark section DirectX 9 games with high quality settings are still demanding on graphics cards. If you are looking for gaming performance the ATI Radeon HD 3850 is leaps and bounds a better choice.

Test

Even at smaller resolutions the GeForce 8800 GT 256MB has a hard time keeping up with the Radeon 3850 and Radeon 3870, which are both priced at or under what the GeForce 8800 GT 256MB is available at. The GeForce 8800 GT 256MB faces tough competition thanks to the Radeon 3800 series and it only clearly beat the Radeon 3800’s in Bioshock. Be sure to consider what games you play the most and the performance of the cards on them when you make your next purchase.

Looking at our card we see that the PCB is a standard green with a nice looking black heatsink. The EVGA logo is prominently displayed along with the type of card it is, so that no one, not even you, will forget what you have. I do like this for the simple fact that you won’t make a mistake this for a 7600 GT or something else. Lurking under that heatsink is the GPU core, clocked at 400MHz, the reference speed for 7600 GS cards. I noticed that EVGA uses all solid aluminum capacitors on this card, which can help give it a longer life over standard electrolytic capacitors. The 512MB of memory comes clocked at 400MHz also.

Benchmark – R6: Vegas

Team Rainbow is a multinational task force comprised of counterterrorism experts from around the globe. Equipped with state-of-the-art weapons, Team Rainbow is deployed during terrorist crises. When all other attempts have failed, Rainbow is brought in to save the lives of innocent people. They do not negotiate with terror. They destroy it. Vegas is a video card killer that depends more on shaders speed than memory speed. Our 7600 GS has a hard time keeping up in Vegas and you may need to drop down the resolution to get playable frame rates depending on your definition of playable.