This is now the 8th card to be released into ATI’s Evergreen GPU family and this time it will bridge the gap between the HD 5770 and HD 5850. The ATI Radeon HD 5830 packs the same Eyefinity, DirectX 11 and PowerPlay support as it’s older brothers, and comes loaded with 1GB of GDDR5 memory clocked at 1000 MHz. Joining in with the 5870 and 5850, the GPU present on the board contains 2.15 billion transistors, however it has only 1120 stream processors, 56 texture units and a core clock speed of 800 MHz – the total power of the card is 1.79 TFLOPS.
Looking at the card (check the pic above) you’ll see that the card is roughly the same size as the HD 5870, and almost identical in design. It comes with two DVI ports, HDMI with audio and a DisplayPort (perfect for 3 display Eyefinity). It’s also a dual-slot card and needs two 6-pin PCIe power inputs to support the card’s 175W max power, which is higher than the HD 5850 due to a higher core clock; the idle power is lower though at 25W.
Onto the stuff you’re most interested in: performance. As you’d expect, the card falls between the HD 5770 and HD 5850 in synthetic benchmarks and just manages to scrape past Nvidia’s nearest competitor – the GeForce GTX 275. However in real world gaming tests, the GTX 275 managed to beat the HD 5830 almost every time, either by only a few FPS (such as in HAWX) or by 10+ FPS (in Far Cry 2). Regardless of the GTX 275 outperforming it slightly, it does have an edge over it thanks to the DX11 support present and a lower power consumption.
The ATI Radeon HD 5830 is priced at US$239 and should be available at most retailers starting today. It’s a great buy if you are wanting support for the latest technologies and ATI features such as Eyefinity as well as admirable performance in games. With Nvidia’s Fermi cards coming out next month we’ll have to see how they stack up against the mighty ATI Evergreen series.
