Sapphire HD5830 Xtreme & HD5850 Xtreme Review

gotdamojo06 - April 11, 2011
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Testing:

Testing of the Sapphire HD5830 Xtreme and Sapphire HD5850 Xtreme will consist of running it and comparison cards through the OverclockersClub.com suite of games and synthetic benchmarks. This will test the performance against many popular competitors. Comparisons will be made to cards of equal and greater capabilities to show where they fall on the performance ladder. The games used are some of today's newest and most popular titles to give you an idea of how the cards perform relative to each other.

The system specifications will remain the same throughout the testing. No adjustment will be made to the respective control panels during the testing other than applying the AA and AF settings manually in the control panel. I will test the cards at stock speeds, then overclocked in order to see the effects of any increases in clock speed. The cards are placed in order from highest to lowest performing in the graphs to show where the cards fall by comparison. In addition to the stock testing, I will include performance testing in both Surround (NVIDIA) and Eyefinity (AMD) with the appropriate cards. For this review, a few new games have replaced some of the aging titles.

Processor: Intel Core I7 920 200x18 3.6GHz
Cooling: Noctua NH-U12P SE 1366
Motherboard: ASUS P6T Deluxe OC Palm Edition
Memory: Mushkin 996805 Redline PC312800 6-8-6-24 1600MHz
Video Card: Sapphire HD5830 Xtreme
Video Card: Sapphire HD5850 Xtreme
Power Supply: Mushkin 1000 watt Joule Modular power supply
Hard Drive: 1 x Seagate 1TB SATA
Optical Drive: LG DVD-RW
OS: Windows 7 Professional 64-bit
Case: NZXT Beta Evo

Comparison Video Cards:

Galaxy GTX 470 GC
XFX HD 5870
Sapphire HD 6870
XFX HD 6850
Sapphire HD 5850 Toxic
EVGA GTX 460 FTW
Sapphire HD6790
Sapphire HD5830 Xtreme
Sapphire HD5850 Xtreme

Overclocking:

Sapphire HD5830 Xtreme - 964MHz / 1198MHz
Sapphire HD5850 Xtreme - 1000MHz / 1230MHz

Overclocking any graphics card that is installed in your system is pretty straight forward. Especially when you are locked out from being able to adjust any of the voltages that go to the card. The overclocking software that I used was the Sapphire TRIXX, which is a very simple overclocking utility that also gives you the ability to view simple data about your graphics card such as temperatures, driver version and clock speeds. The HD5830 Xtreme maxed out at 964MHz on the core, which is an increase of 21% while the memory was only able to go up to 1198MHz or about 20% over stock clock speeds. The Sapphire HD5850 Xtreme was able to make it all the way up to 1GHz on the core or 19% over stock and the memory was able to get all the way up to 1230MHz which is about 17% higher than the standard clock speeds.

Maximum Clock Speeds:

Testing for the maximum clock speed consists of looping Crysis Warhead and Unigine 2.5 for 30 minutes each to see where the clock speeds will fail when pushed. If the clock speed adjustment fails, then the clock speeds and tests are rerun until they pass the full one hour of testing.