Hardware XFX ATI Radeon HD 5830 1GB Review

http://www.bit-tech.net/hardware/graphics/2010/03/22/xfx-radeon-hd-5830-1gb-review/1

Not every Radeon HD 5830 is made equally thanks to ATI's decision not to produce a stock card, but XFX is confident its offering has the edge thanks to a very competitive price tag and custom cooling. Is the HD 5830 a better choice now? We find out.

 

Reckon saving ya pennys till you can afford the HD 5850 would be a better choice.

 

I'm still not convinced by this offering. The only game it really distinguished itself in was World at War, in other games the 5770 or 5850 is a more logical choice. Hopefully Fermi will make ATI bring the 5850 back down to £200.

Also, for this price you could put two 5750s in crossfire (just saying).

 

I just love the general notion that £200+ only gets you what seems to be an average performing Graphics Card these days. I don't care how fast or at what resolutions these latest ATi and the upcoming nVidia cards can run Crysis or future DX11 games, it is an upgrade I can live without when compared to the performance versus cost with regards to the previous genration of GPUs from both companies.

 

just still seems far to expensive for marginal returns.... the 5850 at 200 was good, this at margnialy less seems a big pile of meh....

fermi will be overly expensive but perhaps offers some return... otherwise the 4890 seems still the best card of the moment.

 

This is exactly what we were talking about last week actually - graphics cards have stagnated. Throwing more and more shaders etc doesn't give a tangible performance jump unlike previous generations.

 

"This is exactly what we were talking about last week actually - graphics cards have stagnated. Throwing more and more shaders etc doesn't give a tangible performance jump unlike previous generations."

would be nice if they'd just managed to drop the price.... this gen higher price and less performance.

 

So £180 for a performance increase of about 25-30% over my Radeon 4850 1Gb......

No thanks.....

The £75 i paid for my 4850 (new) last July seems like bargain of the decade.....

The only good thing about PC games these days is the fact that all the gfx engines today are designed to run on 2004/2005 era hardware that are stuck in the 360 and Ps3, which means my 4850 is likely to remain powerful enough for another year or two.

 

This gen is also next-gen DirectX, lower power consumption, and lower heat output too don't forget. You get far more performance per watt, at least until that convection oven of a Fermi comes along.

 

i feel current graphics generations seems to go like this:
-double all numbers for new generation
-shrink die hoping for acceptable thermals/power usage
-expect 1.6x performance increase rather than double

expect more added gimmicks before the next generation of consoles. eyefinity, 3d vision are just the start.

 

I actually prefer it this way, at least you get a choice of well/bad overclockers, well cooled but noisy or quiet.
On some generations virtually all boards were the same, featuring the same boring fan. Distributors only differentiating themselves by decals.
I guess noone wants that.

 

It may be a coincidence... but I do think it is strange that hardware seems to have really outgrown the needs of software. Soundcards are largely unrequired due to HD Audio featuring on Motherboards as standard. As more and more developers concentrate on the console market, or at least making game engines compatible with the current console hardware, Graphics Cards as used in PCs are largely sufficient for gaming requirements unless you have a monitor with silly high resolutions that most games don't even support. And most recently we have a desktop CPU (albeit an 'Extreme Edition') that is well pretty much unrequired in a desktop and more suited to workstation or severs. So I wouldn't say that GPU or even hardware development in general has stagnated. More that current software just isn't push the barriers it once used to.

 

I would like to see crossfire and eyefinity results with this card. While crossfire isn't always a good idea it does give an idea of where it performs in relation to the top cards. With current prices HD5770 in crossfire could be a better investment, and crossfire will be needed if your going for an eyefinity setup

 

I think it would be interesting if you guys were to introduce bad company 2 to your game benchmarks. Unlike MW2, the engine is brand new and it's also one of the most popular game on bit-tech these days

just an idea

 

which is why i'm toying with buying a 5770 over the 5850 for my partial bust 9800gtx

 

God-dammit, they lengthened the PCB over the initial announcement. That old PCB looked to be a 7-inch (17.8cm), like the 5670 reference 'card, and that would be just the thing for mITX gaming...

 

XFX actually put a "real" heat sink on it. Did they finally figure out the extruded aluminum crap doesn't work
?

 

Stay tuned (hopefully)

 

Fair play to XFX for pricing this really well. Not only is it a great deal (compared to other price points), but it is going to push prices down on all other vendors competing cards. At least one would hope.

And in doing this they missed the oppurtunity to really milk as much money as possible out of people, which seems to be a pretty popular outlook with VGAs these days.

 

Just picked up a 5770 today for my sons new rig, performance is a real let down, its certainly no quicker than a GTX260 running 182.50, this 5830 is also priced too closely to the 5850 to be worth choosing. Sometimes just a 2-3 fps average can be enough to make a game playable, something that isn't widely recognised.