ATI Radeon HD 5830 Pro Reviews

This card plugs the DirectX 11 price gap between the mainstream HD 5770 and the enthusiast-level HD 5850. It's fast, but its performance at high resolutions doesn't beat that of much cheaper cards by a whole lot.

The Radeon HD 5830 offers gamers what they have been demanding, gameplay performance that is superior to the Radeon HD 5770, but at a price that is cheaper than the Radeon HD 5850. The Radeon HD 5830 fills a $100 gap that existed between the Radeon HD 5770 and Radeon HD 5850.

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.

The ATI Radeon HD 5830 is one of the most satisfying releases yet in AMD's 5000-series video card line. Like its much-cheaper cousin, the 5670, it offers significant gaming potential at a lower price than you might expect. It's not going to be ideal for absolutely everyone—it can't handle the full depth of DirectX 11 capabilities with a lot of other visual bells and whistles enabled, for one thing. But for much of the large library of available DX10 games, it'll deliver comfortable speed and impressive visuals that the moderately hard-core gamer won't need to auction an organ for.

The Radeon HD 5830 fills the gap between the HD 5770 and the HD 5850 pretty well though not without some lingering performance questions and debate surrounding it. For users looking for a sub-$250 graphics card option going into spring the HD 5830 makes a great choice but as is usually the case, make sure you completely understand what options are out there before hitting that buy now button.

AMD is back to serious gaming business with the Radeon HD 5830 after messing around with a few less exciting budget-oriented solutions. While it is very important to provide gamers with a cost effective option, we feel that the Radeon HD 5570 and 5670 graphics cards don't deliver a great value if gaming performance is what you are after.

Incredibly similar gaming performance makes comparisons between the Radeon HD 5830 and Radeon HD 4890 easy. The similarities don't end there, as both cards were launched at similar price points. Almost certainly, given enough time and (hopefully) some competition, the Radeon HD 5830 will drop in price and deliver the same price/performance ratio that the Radeon HD 4890 has spoiled us with.

The HD 5830 is going to be a popular model; the price is good, it lets people say they own a HD 5800 series card without spending $300 and we get the feeling there's going to be some decent OC potential here as well.

ATI's latest addition to its graphics card lineup doesn't set any new records but does strike a good balance between price and performance, and of course brings support for the latest DirectX 11 games and triple monitor setups. Just make sure to check carefully which card you're actually getting, as different board partners will have different configurations.

AMD's Radeon HD 5830 is probably the last of the HD 5000-series we will see before NVIDIA launches its much anticipated Fermi cards. This means Advanced Micro Devices has only so much time to increase its market share, before uses have something to compare these DirectX 11 cards to. On the one hand, the release of NVIDIA’s next-generation GeForce cards is a good thing, as it will probably make AMD reconsider the pricing of its current cards, consequently letting an increased number of transitions to the new generation.

We had high hopes for AMD's last major entrant to the Radeon 5-series ranks. Engineered to fill the gap between the HD 5770 and HD 5850 parts - spanning £100 - the Radeon HD 5830 accomplishes the task...kind of. Evaluated at a resolution of 1,920x1,200, performance of the card is just over 10 per cent higher than the HD 5770's, but the Radeon HD 5850 is 25 per cent faster still. Going by nomenclature, then, it's more akin to a '5790' than a '5830', according to our benchmark findings. The underwhelming performance of HD 5830 could have been mitigated if factors such as price and energy efficiency were sharp. However, based on a Radeon HD 5850 PCB, power credentials are practically identical to its bigger brother, and the use of a custom cooler and large-die GPU also means that Radeon HD 5830 won't be cheap: our latest pricing indicates an etail price of least £190.