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The Radeon HD 5830 confused us when we first took it out of the box. Here we have a graphics card that is intended to fill the gap between the Radeon HD 5770 and 5850 in terms of price and performance. The Radeon HD 5770 measures 21cm long, while the 5850 is 24cm long, and the mighty 5870 is a whopping 28cm long.
Therefore we were expecting a graphics card with the model number 5830 to measure no more than 24cm long, while it was half expected that the card would be about 22-23cm long. However when we took it out of the box the Radeon HD 5830 appeared much longer than this, and it was. Unexpectedly, the AMD reference sample measures the same length as the 5870, 28cm long. In fact the reference sample of the Radeon HD 5830 that we received was identical to the 5870 in every way. At first we just assumed that because the AIB (Add-In-Board) partners were designing their own boards AMD just stuck their sample cards on the 5870 PCB. However having looked at Radeon HD 5830 products from Gigabyte, HIS, PowerColor and Sapphire, it appears that most 5830 graphics cards will measure 28cm long. There is no real explanation for why the Radeon HD 5830 graphics cards are so long when the 5850 cards are 4cm shorter. The Radeon HD 5830 does consume more power than the 5850 cards under load, around 16% more, so perhaps this could be the reason behind the longer PCB design. Still, we expect clever manufacturers to come up with a more compact design. Actually, we have already seen photos of a Radeon HD 5830 graphics cards from XFX which measures just 17cm. Unfortunately, at this stage we have only seen photos of this product and the specifications have not been confirmed. Still, if XFX have been able to reduce the length by almost 40%, that really would be something.
Getting back to the Radeon HD 5830 that we have in hand, this sample features a fairly large aluminum heatsink that is made up of 36 fins measuring 13.5cm long, 6.5cm wide, and 2.5cm tall. Connected to the base of the heatsink are four copper heatpipes which help improve efficiency. Cooling this heatsink is a 75x20mm blower fan that draws air in from within the case and pushes it out through the rear of the graphics card. Like the Radeon HD 5850, we have found that the Radeon HD 5830 is a very quiet graphics card when at idle. With a claimed idle consumption level of just 27 watts, the Radeon HD 5870 has little reason to make any noise at idle. However when we began to game, the fan did spin up and make quite a noise, though it was similar to that of other high-end Radeon graphics cards, so nothing unusual here.
The new Radeon HD 5830 uses a 40nm design which was first introduced by AMD with the Radeon HD 4770. This has allowed AMD to be quite aggressive with the core speed, clocking it at 800MHz. The GDDR5 memory works at a more impressive frequency of 1000MHz on this particular model. The GPU configuration features an impressive 1120 SPUs, along with 56 TAUs (Texture Address Units) and 16 ROPs (Rasterization Operator Units).
As me mentioned a moment ago, the Radeon HD 5830 can consume up to 175 watts of power when pushed hard. In order to feed the graphics card enough power AMD has included a pair of 6-pin PCI Express power connectors. This is the same configuration that you will find on the older Radeon HD 4870/4890 and GeForce GTX 285 graphics cards for example.
The Radeon HD 5830 also supports Crossfire technology, and therefore in the standard position is a pair of Crossfire connectors for bridging two or more cards together. The only other connectors can be found on the I/O panel, and our AMD sample featured two dual DVI connectors, along with a HDMI and Display Port connection. It is worth noting that all Radeon HD 5830 graphics cards can support a maximum resolution of 2560x1600 on not one but rather three monitors. |
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Posted on: 03/01/2010 07:23 AM
Nvidia needs to release their next-gen cards so pricing will come down on cards like this. The Radeon HD 5830 is a nice card but its still too expensive! |