Last month Sapphire released the Radeon HD 5850 Toxic, which is a custom designed ATI Radeon HD 5850 that looks nothing like the reference designed board that it is derived from. The Sapphire 'Toxic' Radeon HD 5850 1GB card that we have here today is clocked at 765MHz on the core and 1125MHz on the memory. Read on to see how it performs and to see how far we can overclock it!

Overclocking performance on the Sapphire HD 5850 TOXIC Edition video card was amazing. We were able to take the card from 765MHz core clock and 1125MHz memory clock all the way up to 901MHz core clock and 1200MHz memory clock. This is a 24% increase on the core clock and a 20% increase on the memory clock from a reference design Radeon HD 5850 as a normal ATI Radeon HD 5850 runs at just 700MHz on the core and 1000MHz on the memory. By overclocking the Sapphire HD 5850 TOXIC Edition graphics card it was nearly able to perform on the same level as the Radeon HD 5870!