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We have collected 3 reviews of the XFX Radeon HD 5830. Experts rate XFX Radeon HD 5830 6/10. Reviewsor.com helps you find reviews, best prices, user reviews of the XFX Radeon HD 5830 and XFX Graphics cards.
With videocard sales starting to ramp up for the third and forth quarter of 2010, the HD 5830 should be following the same brisk sales trend since its release in February. The Radeon HD 5830 has the perfect mix of gaming performance and the lowest MSRP of the 5800 line which has consumers ponying up the extra US$40 versus settling with the HD 5770. Following every other manufacturer's release, XFX also has their HD 5830 flavor up for grabs with excellent availability and stock in most popular online retail channels. The particular model being reviewed today is nothing fancy is not factory overclocked in any way out of the box. But this doesn't mean that there won't be some overclocking headroom to enable some extra tweaking and get a little more pop out of your money and extend this product's useful life span in order to get your money's worth. So let's see how it compares to the other HD 5830 models I have tested and whether or not it will match them in stock and overclocked form. Let's see how this card works out...
You have to give AMD credit for trying to make lemonade out of lemons. The Radeon HD 5830 is the odd duck of AMD’s 5000-series GPUs. The card itself is as long as the high-end HD 5870, and consumes more power at idle than the Radeon HD 5850. But that’s what you’d expect of a card built on a “salvaged” chip. Salvaged chips are produced by taking chips that fail to pass muster as the highest-end part and selling them as lower-end parts. This can be seen in the Radeon HD 5830, which has 1,120 stream processors active, as opposed to 1,440 for the HD 5850 or 1,600 for the 5870. Unlike AMD’s lower-end HD 5770, which uses the Juniper GPU, with 1.05 billion transistors and 800 stream processors, the 5830 sports the same 2.15-billion-transistor GPU as the 5870/5850, with more functional units disabled. The potential performance bottleneck of the 5830 isn’t fewer computational units. The HD 5830 has only 56 texture units and 16 ROPs, as compared to the 72 texture units and 32 ROPs of the Radeon HD 5850. This ultimately is what may limit throughput. To sum up: The Radeon HD 5830 is very much a cut-down Radeon HD 5870 on a large board with higher idle power than the slightly more expensive HD 5850—and with performance that’s likely to be much lower.
In our Radeon HD 5830 preview, we tested a sample card from AMD that wasn't really representative of the final retail products. One of the cards we talked about in the review was XFX's version of the 5830. XFX's card looked to be one of the most promising offerings of the lot, so we asked them to send us one for a closer look. I had hoped to do a quick-turnaround review on this card by comparing it to our existing test data, but the arrival of a six-display Eyefinity rig in Damage Labs caused a major disruption. I had to disassemble my GPU test bench, essentially, to make room. As a result, I'm not sure exactly when I'll be able to give this 5830 card a full and proper review, but I thought you all might want to have a brief look at it. Yep, still a good-looking card. One thing you may notice right away, though, is that it's not exactly as compact as the sample shot of it we received from AMD, which looked like so. Um, yeah. The real thing is a 10"-long card that is, crucially, just under an inch shorter than a Radeon HD 5870 with its Batmobile cooler. That's just fine, even good compared to some 5830s, which are based on the 5870 reference design. But it's not quite the feat of miniaturization that first PR picture suggested.