The INQUIRER? That's my home page... - Intel field sales engineer
|
|
|
AMD Radeon HD 5830 appears
AMD HAS LAUNCHED its cheaper 5800-series card, the Radeon HD 5830, placing the last Evergreen part on the market.
The card is being labelled by most sites, including The Inquirer, as a “filler card”, as it is a cut-down part based on the Cypress core that has been slightly de-toothed to bridge the gap between the HD 5770 and the HD 5850. Cut from the same Cypress wafer as its bigger brothers, the die has some 1120 stream processors, some 480 less than its bigger siblings. AMD also reduced the number of texture units to 56 and left only 16 ROPs. The core pushes pixels along at 800MHz, 75MHz faster than the HD 5850, but the memory remains the same as that of its big brother, 1GB of 1GHz GDDR5 on a 256-bit bus.
Considering the price tag on the card of about $240, it seems that AMD placed it just halfway between the HD 5850 and the HD 4890. However, most reviewers are already complaining that if you strictly count FPS, it isn’t worth the asking price. Performance-wise, numbers show the Radeon HD 5830 hovering on average above the GTX 260 (216) and just shy of the GTX 275, depending on the benchmark used. This means it delivers just about the same FPS at the same price as the GTX 260 (216), yet you get all those nice little details like lower power consumption - although the load figures are higher on the HD 5830 than on the HD 5850 due to the higher clock - plus Eyefinity, DirectX 11, and so on.
The card is available now from major etailers and will filter down the food chain to a store near you in no time. This isn’t surprising as the chips are hardly new stuff.
In the end, it’s shaping up to be a good performer with just a few question marks, price/performance for one. If you want frame-rate and can disregard power consumption and DX 11, you’re better off with an HD 4890. However, if you think that you can’t do without the Evergreen features and have $240 (€250 or £215) burning a hole in your pants, then by all means. µ
Share this:
Share
Aleksa, your statements apply well to the one review I've read so far, but that review is based on a pre-production design and older drivers.
I think at least some production cards will be more energy efficient by design and the performance will increase by some extent as new drivers are released.
Still, the 5830 doesn't seem to be as good as I hoped for.
The 5830 aka ATI Fermi is the real picture of the ATI 5830 compering to ATI Evergreen lineup of video cards.
The 5830, is on pair with 5850 just in terms of power usage - heat on load, same PCB, connectivity and cooling.
5830 is 3% - 8% faster than 5770, the best deal at the moment its 5770 and 4890.
5830 is overpriced, hot, buggy and slow it terms of price - performance compared to ATI 5770, 4890 and Nvidia 260.
If you need DirectX 9,10 and 10.1 best choice is 4890. For the fans of DirectX 11 best choice is 5770 or 5850.
The 5830 is not filling the gap between 5770 and 4890 with current pricing, power, heat, performance and drivers, in turn it creates a Grand Canyon. :-D