Tathya.net

As Tathya described, the Radeon  HD 5830 was designed to slot into AMD’s graphics card line-up right in between the Radeon HD 5770 and the Radeon HD 5850. take a look at the specs in the table below, you’ll see how AMD went about it.

ATI Radeon  HD 5570,is launched few weeks ago and we find out that announcing yet another Radeon HD 5000 series card. With the relatively speaking of Radeon HD 5000 series releases over the past 5 or 6 months, it would be easy to dismiss today’s launch of the Radeon HD 5830 as a move by AMD to simply use more marginal Cypress GPUs, thus increasing effective yields, while at the same time sticking it to NVIDIA again. But a quick look at the ATI’s 5000-series product stack reveals the other major reason. Here’s how the currently available cards in the Radeon HD 5000 series line up in terms of market price as available.

Model                  Price
ATI Radeon HD 5450      $45       3500 INR.
ATI Radeon HD 5570      $85       4100 INR.
ATI Radeon HD 5670      $115      6500 INR.
ATI Radeon HD 5770      $159      6700 INR.
ATI Radeon HD 5850      $299      14352 INR.
ATI Radeon HD 5870      $399      19152 INR.
ATI Radeon HD 5970      $699      33552 INR.

As Tathya described, the Radeon  HD 5830 was designed to slot into AMD’s graphics card line-up right in between the Radeon HD 5770 and the Radeon HD 5850. take a look at the specs in the table below, you’ll see how AMD went about it.

ATI Radeon HD 5830 comes with the same 2.15B transistor GPU as the Radeon HD 5850 and 5870. With the 5830, While, a number of stream processing units have been disabled, bringing the active one SP count down to 1120. The same 1GB of GDDR5 memory running at 1GHz (4.0Gbps effective) used on the 5850 makes its way onto the Radeon HD 5830, but the GPU clock on the 5830 is much higher–800MHz to be exact. Texture fillrate and compute performance  for the 5830 is again somewhere in between the 5770 and 5850, but note that the Radeon HD 5830’s raw pixel fillrate is actually a bit lower than the more affordable 5770. Also note, that the Radeon HD 5830 has a max board power, which is higher than the 5850 i.e. 175W. Despite having fewer Stream Processors, the higher GPU clock on the 5830 will result in extreme higher power consumption.

The reference ATI Radeon HD 5830 we tested was virtually indistinguishable from a Radeon HD 5870, aesthetically speaking. The card was 10.5″ long and featured a black fan shroud that encased the entire PCB. The card’s cooler has a barrel fan that draws air into the shroud, where it is forced through the heatsink and partially exhausted from the system through vents in the card’s mounting plate. Two more small vents at the back also direct some air within the system.

The outputs on the ATI Radeon HD 5830 consist of dual link DVI outputs, an HDMI output (with audio) and a DisplayPort output, and like the other cards of the Radeon HD 5000 series the 5830 supports 3-monitor Eyefinity configurations. Also note, that because the card has a max board power of 175W, it requires dual 6-pin supplemental PCIe power connectors.

Testing Graphic Card

Team Tathya tested the graphics cards in this article on an Gigabyte GA-EX58-UD5 motherboard powered by a Core i7 965 quad-core processor and 6GB of OCZ DDR3 RAM. The first thing we did when configuring the test system was enter the system BIOS and set all values to their “optimized” or “high performance” default settings. Then we manually configured the memory timings and disabled any integrated peripherals that wouldn’t be put to use. The hard drive was then formatted, and Windows 7 Ultimate x64 was installed. When the installation was complete we fully updated the OS and installed the latest hotfixes, along with the necessary drivers and applications.

Unigine Heaven Benchmark

The Heaven benchmark–when run in DX11 mode–makes comprehensive use of tessellation technology and advanced SSAO (screen-space ambient occlusion), and it also features volumetric cumulonimbus clouds generated by a physically accurate algorithm and a dynamic sky with light scattering. The Unigine Heaven Benchmarks is built around the Unigine game engine. Unigine is a cross-platform real-time 3D engine. with support for DirectX 9, DirectX 10, DirectX 11 and OpenGL. Due to the fact that we tested Heaven in DX11 mode, no NVIDIA cards are represented in the graph below.

The ATI’s latest 5830, 5850, 5870 performed well as expected in the Unigine Heaven Benchmark.The new Radeon HD 5830 is switched right in between the higher end 5850 and more affordable 5770.

3D Mark Vantage

The latest version of Futuremark’s synthetic 3D gaming benchmark, 3DMark Vantage, is specifically bound to Windows Vista-based systems because it uses some advanced visual technologies that are only available with DirectX 10, which y isn’t available on previous versions of Windows.  3DMark Vantage isn’t simply a port of 3DMark06 to DirectX 10 though.  With this latest version of the benchmark, Futuremark has incorporated two new graphics tests, two new CPU tests, several new feature tests, in addition to support for the latest PC hardware.  We tested the graphics cards here with 3DMark Vantage’s Extreme preset option, which uses a resolution of 1920×1200 with 4x anti-aliasing and 16x anisotropic filtering.

As if viewed according to 3DMark Vantage, the new Radeon HD 5830 is a better graphic performer than the similarly priced GeForce GTX 275, and of course the Radeon HD 5770. The Radeon HD 5850 and GeForce GTX 285, however, come out ahead.

Crysis v 1.21

If you believe thet you are at all into crazy computing, the highly anticipated single player, FPS smash-hit Crysis, should require no introduction. Crytek’s game engine produces some stunning visuals that are easily the most impressive real-time 3D renderings we’ve seen on the PC to date.  The engine employs some of the latest techniques in 3D rendering like Parallax Occlusion Mapping, Subsurface Scattering, Motion Blur and Depth-of-Field effects, as well as some of the most impressive use of Shader technology we’ve seen yet.  In short, for those of you that want to skip the technical jib-jab, Crysis is a beast of a game.  We ran the full game patched to v1.21 with all of its visual options set to ‘Very High’ to put a significant load on the graphics cards being tested  A custom demo recorded on the Ice level was used throughout testing.

The Radeon HD 5830 and GeForce GTX 275 perform at virtually the same level in our custom Crysis benchmark, with each card trading victories depending on the resolution, but even then the deltas were tiny. The Radeon HD 5850 has a relatively commanding lead here, with the Radeon HD 5770 bringing up the rear.

Tom Clancy’s H.A.W.X.

Tom Clancy’s H.A.W.X. is an aerial warfare video game that takes place during the time of Tom Clancy’s Ghost Recon Advanced Warfighter.  Players have the opportunity to take the throttle of over 50 famous aircrafts in both solo and 4-player co-op missions, and take them over real world locations and cities in photo-realistic environments created with the best commercial satellite data provided by GeoEye.  We used the built-in performance  test at two resolutions with all quality settings set to their highest values, using the DX10 code path for the GeForce cards, and DX10.1 path for the Radeons.

Once again, we see the Radeon HD 5850 pull well ahead of the pack, as the new Radeon HD 5830 and GeForce GTX 275 finish within a couple of frames per second of each other. The GeForce GTX 285 was marginally faster than the 5830, and the 5770 trailed the pack.

System Power Consumption

As this article had came to it’s end, we’d like to cover a few final data points–namely power consumption and noise. Throughout all of our benchmarking and testing, we monitored how much power our test system was consuming using a power meter. Our goal was to give you all an idea as to how much power each configuration used while idling and while under a heavy workload. Please keep in mind that we were testing total system power consumption at the outlet here, not just the power being drawn by the graphics cards alone.

Team Tathya is not going to focus much on these power consumption numbers, mostly because the reference Radeon  HD 5830 card we tested is nothing like all of the partner boards we’ve seen coming down the pipeline. With that said, due to the Radeon HD 5830’s higher GPU clock, it is likely to consume more power than the 5850, despite the fact that the 5830 has few active stream processor. The specs provided by AMD even have the 5830 with a higher max board power than the Radeon HD 5850.

In our tests, the Radeon HD 5830 consumed slightly less power than its higher-end counterpart at idle, but slightly more under load. The 5830’s idle and load power characteristics were both lower than either of the GeForce cards, however.

Performance Summary and Conclusion

All characteristics considered, the ATI Radeon  HD 5830 proved to be a better graphic card. At its expected $239 price point, the Radeon HD 5830’s closest competition from NVIDIA is currently the GeForce GTX 275. In that match-up, strictly from a performance standpoint, the GeForce GTX 275 has a slight edge overall. In the games and applications we tested, the Radeon HD 5830 wins a few tests and the GeForce GTX 275 wins a few. But the GTX 275 pulled ahead more often than not. The deltas separating the two cards, however, were always relatively small. Factor in the Radeon HD 5830’s lower power consumption, and support for DX11 and Eyefinity, however, and it easily becomes the better buy in our opinion.

we explained that the Radeon HD 5830 was being introduced to fill in the gap in the Radeon HD 5000 series separating the Radeon HD 5850 and the 5770. Looking back at the numbers, it’s blatantly obvious that’s exactly where the Radeon HD 5830 falls in AMD’s current graphics card line-up in terms of performance. And with an SEP (suggested e-tail price) of $239, the Radeon HD 5830 falls smack dab in the middle of the $319-ish Radeon HD 5850 and $165-ish Radeon HD 5770 too.

Although it’s clearly a solid performer, the Radeon HD 5830 is a tricky recommendation. If you’ve got a monitor with a native resolution of 1680×1050, it may be advisable to save a few bucks and go with the 5770, which was right on the 5830’s heals at that resolution throughout testing. If you’ve got a monitor that supports a native resolution of 1920×1200 or higher though, the additional investment necessary to score a Radeon HD 5850 may be worth it.

The Radeon HD 5830 is clearly the best card to purchase at its price point. Unless you’ve got to have PhysX support, we’d trade the GTX 275’s slight performance advantage overall for the Radeon HD 5830’s support for DX11 and superior power consumption/thermal characteristics.

So, with the Radeon HD 5000 series fully fleshed out and covering virtually every meaningful price point, you may think AMD is done with product launches for a while, but you’d be wrong. The Radeon HD 5870 Eyefinity 6 Edition is slated for release sometime in the not too distant future. As you can see in the slide above, the card is essentially the same as the current Radeon HD 5870, but with a larger 2GB frame buffer and of course, support for up to 6 monitors. Power consumption is marginally higher as well, due to the increased number of chips and outputs on the card.

Good

Competitive Price

Strong Performer

DX 11 Support

Eyefinity Support

Bad

Relatively High Power Consumption

Doesn’t Dominate the Older GTX 275