ATI Radeon HD 5830 Review: Filling The Gap

Here we are, barely two weeks removed from the launch of the ATI Radeon HD 5570, and we find ourselves in the now familiar position of announcing yet another Radeon HD 5000 series card. With the breakneck pace (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 yet again. But a quick look at the company'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 street price.

You'll notice there's a fairly significant gap between the Radeon HD 5770 and Radeon HD 5850, which just so happens to be where pricing falls for most of NVIDIA's current single-GPU based GeForce line-up. So, it should come as no surprise to the astute observer that filling that gap in the Radeon HD 5000 series is a pre-planned, strategic move on AMD's part. Oh, and while we're at it, there's also a relatively large gap between the Radeon HD 5870 and 5970; we wonder what AMD has in store to fill that gap? *cough* Radeon HD 5870 2GB Eyefinity 6 Edition *cough*.

The major features and specifications of the Radeon HD 5830 are listed in the slide below, but there's more to the 5830 story than what you see there. Or should we say, what you don't see?

The ATI Radeon HD 5830

Much groundwork had to be laid over the preceding months and even years before AMD could produce the entire Radeon HD 5000 series of products. Although the GPU at the heart of the Radeon HD 5830 is based on the same architecture as the other members of the DX-11 class Radeon HD 5000 series, the chip does leverage technologies already implemented in previously released GPU generations, so it's not all new.  As such, we'd recommend perusing some recent HotHardware articles to brush up on a few of the technologies and features employed by the new Radeon HD 5830...

• AMD ATI Radeon HD 5870: Unquestionably Number One
• ATI Radeon HD 4890: The RV790 Unveiled
• ATI Radeon HD 4870 X2 - AMD Back On Top
• ATI Radeon HD 4850 and 4870: RV770 Has Arrived
• ATI Radeon HD 3870 and 3850: 55nm RV670
• ATI Catalyst Driver Analysis: CrossFireX and More
• AMD Hybrid CrossFire Sneak Peek

The articles listed above cover many of the features available with the Radeon HD 5830, like the UVD 2 video engine, Catalyst Control Center, PowerPlay, GDDR5 memory, and more. There are also, however, many brand new things that were introduced with the Radeon HD 5800 series that we detailed in our Radeon HD 5870 coverage, so that article at the very least is a must-read companion to this one--well, if you want to get the full scoop anyway.