ATI HD 5830 Launch Review - PAGE 1

The HD 5000 series just continues to roll out unabated, following mostly in the footsteps made by the HD 4000 series: just this time, with more regularility, and less competition. The intervening time since the launch of the HD 5870 six months ago, until now, Nvidia has pushed back the release of their next-generation Fermi GPU further along the calendar, while ATI has been releasing new models monthly; like clockwork. With today's HD 5830 we have a fully fleshed out line, from the entry-level HD 5450, to the dual-GPU beast HD 5970, and just about everywhere in between. Possibly the only absent brother in the HD 5000 family, after today, may be the expected HD 5890, which certainly isn't late, as it (will probably) be a refresh product.

So, where abouts does the HD 5830 fit in? The simpliest answer would be right between the HD 5770 and the HD 5830. Last generation, the HD 5830 offered great value, and in fact, the MSI R4830 was one of this reviewer's personal favorites looked at last year. The HD 4830 could generally be overclocked to the point where it exceed stock HD 4850 performance, thus, offered great value for an inexpensive price tag. This generation's HD 5830 is a bit different, relatively speaking, so we'll have to see if it offers the same whiz-bang today.

The HD 5830 will be selling for a recommended price of $239 USD. This seems like it will actually be the price you'll first see this card at -- unlike, sometimes, with other suggested retail prices that don't match up with expected targets. To put this in perspective, currently HD 5770's are going for about $160-$180, while the HD 5850 is rarely less than $300 USD. As you can see, the HD 5830 will be selling for a price closer to the HD 5770 -- so the performance turns out to be instead closer to the HD 5850, then we might have a great deal on our hands. But conclusions will have to await of course, for our benchmarks.

In a bit of a change of pace for ATI, the HD 5850 will be launching with custom designs out of the gates, from board partners today. Usually, when a new model comes out, initially all the board partners sell basically the same thing: a card physically identical to the reference board design, made by ATI. This isn't the case here -- board partners have had HD 5830s for a while it seems, so have had time to leave their own marks on the product. Below is a gallery of these diffferent variations. For our review, we will be looking at engineering sample HD 5830 from ATI that has the familiar HD 5770 and HD 5xxx series cooler on it.

Below we have offerings from our friends Gigabyte, XFX (who switched from Nvidia to ATI), PowerColor and Sapphire. As you can see these aren't just rebadged cards, they are significantly different constructions of the HD 5830.

On the next page we'll take a look at our HD 5830 from ATI.