Sapphire Radeon 5850 Toxic Review

Sapphire 5850 Toxic card and box

5850 Toxic and Radeon 5870 reference board

Improving on the Radeon 5800 reference design

Now that ATI’s sorted out their supply issues with the Radeon 5800 series, they’re opening things up and allowing their board partners to differentiate their cards from each other: in the coming months, ASUS, MSI, PowerColor and others will begin releasing custom Radeon 5850 boards that don’t rely on ATI’s reference board design and cooling. As a result, you’ll finally see some variety amongst the 5850 boards at retail; finally the cards themselves won’t be exact replicas of each other!

They’ll all be hard-pressed to top Sapphire though.

GeForce GTX 285 meets the 5850 Toxic

5850 reference board and Sapphire 5850 Toxic

Sapphire’s latest creation is the Radeon 5850 Toxic Edition. Like many of the high-end 5850 boards that are already available on the market, the 5850 Toxic Edition is factory OC’ed to deliver even more performance than the stock 5850 specifications provide. Where the Toxic differs from those other boards though is in its cooling, as Sapphire ships the Toxic with their own custom cooling solution. If you recall our review of Sapphire’s 5870 Toxic board from November, you know that we were enamored with Sapphire’s custom cooler, which relies on vapor chamber cooling technology along with heatpipes.

This combination proved to be quite potent, allowing the 5870 Toxic to run up to 11 degrees Celsius than ATI’s stock cooler in our testing, all while running five decibels cooler at load.


Sapphire makes even bolder claims for the 5850 Toxic. Their PR states that the 5850 Toxic runs up to 15 degrees cooler than reference, while generating 10 dB less noise than stock 5850 cards.

Those are pretty bold claims, especially considering that the Radeon 5850 runs fairly cool and quiet in stock form. Let’s see if Sapphire can deliver…