AMD’s Radeon HD 5830: A Filler Card at the Wrong Price
by Ryan Smith on February 24, 2010 12:00 AM EST- Posted in
- GPUs
Power & Temperature
Since AMD isn’t doing a reference Radeon HD 5830, non-performance data is of limited value. Even with the variety of cards among AMD’s partners, the power draw of the 5830 cards should be within a few watts of each other and vary only with the difference in their fans so long as they use a 5870 PCB. On the other hand temperature data is going to heavily depend on the cooler used, and noise data is completely useless here since it entirely depends on the cooler used.
So we have power and temperature data for you, but please keep in mind that this temperature data is really only useful as a frame of reference – retail cards could be quite dissimilar.
At idle, the power usage is just as AMD promised: it’s a hair under the 5850, by a single watt to be exact. As far as high-end cards go, this is the least power hungry among them when idling.
Under load the story is quite a bit more interesting. We know the 5830 is rated for a TDP between the 5850 and 5870 that’s much closer to the 5870, but the power draw doesn’t reflect that. Here it’s 17W over the 5850, and nearly 70W off the 5870. We’ve double checked and the card isn’t throttling (a very possible situation given the higher voltage used) so we’re not quite sure what to make of these results. The 5830 is apparently more alike the 5850 than the 5870 when it comes to power consumption, which is certainly a good thing since it means it edges out the 4870 and 4890, and is well ahead of the GTX 275.
With an eye on the fact that this temperature data is going to be heavily dependent on the cooler used, for our sample card we certainly have some interesting results. Under idle this is the coolest of our high-end cards, which is no surprise given the use of the 5870’s big cooler and the lower idle power usage of the 5830. On the other hand under load, even with the otherwise minor difference in power draw compared to the 5850 and the bigger cooler it’s 5C hotter, which is actually more in-line with what we would have expected. However it still stays below the 4800 series and the 5870, both of which get warm enough that they really have to rev up their fans.
It’ll be interesting to see just how good the vendor coolers end up being. With the relatively low load power usage, the 5830 doesn’t have to be a particularly loud card.
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Ryan Smith - Thursday, February 25, 2010 - link
We redo our test suite roughly every 6 months. We'll be redoing it in time for GF100, but this uses the same suite we had for the 5870 launch. In the mean time benchmarking DX11 games doesn't really tell us a whole lot when the results are going to be perfectly in lockstep with the performance differences of the 5000 series cards.gumdrops - Thursday, February 25, 2010 - link
The Fermi cards that are coming out in April aren't exactly competing in the same price point as this one and it'll be months more before NVIDIA even announces mainstream Fermi derivants.It would be nice to know if this card is closer to a 5850 in DX11 performance than a 5770.
Calin - Thursday, February 25, 2010 - link
Yes, it would be nice to know.However, a new test methodology would invalidate the earlier results - unlike now, when you have a graph with 20 cards, you'll have a graph with two cards (that's it, until the old cards are retested, which will take quite a bit of time).
ET - Thursday, February 25, 2010 - link
But Fermi being in another price range might not prevent Anandtech from testing the lower end cards again. They did test the 3870 in the 5x00 reviews, which I thought was a nice touch.HotFoot - Thursday, February 25, 2010 - link
It really was nice to see a 3870 in the graphs. I don't upgrade my video card every generation, and in fact this round went from a 3870 to a 5870. I hope in a couple years' time I'll be able to see the odd 5870 performance comparison to some 7xxx-generation (or nvidia equivalent).sc3252 - Thursday, February 25, 2010 - link
I can't say I am surprised, the 5770 was a huge let down, and the 5450 wasn't much better. Really I was thinking the same thing looking at every graph, way to much. It shouldn't even be priced at $200 more like $189. You should have just given them a big fat F at the end of the review.As a 5850 owner I really do think a lot of the Directx 11 effects really don't go well with the cards, the cards take to much of a hit to enable the effects a lot of the time and makes me feel like I am gaming on a umm 5800 fx series card.
smokedturkey - Thursday, February 25, 2010 - link
This is the reason I am still using a Radeon X1900 Crossfire Edition i picked up on Ebay for $65 to play Oblivion at 1650x1080 high settings. hahaha I wonder where the performance vs. price has really come into play these last few years?ev1l - Friday, July 9, 2010 - link
I want to buy a new video card and i can not...I have a old 8800gts512 and i still dont have any reason to change it....
I saw less than 100w for all my system, silence and fresh
i ply crysis, i ply dirt, i ply stalker, left4dead2 etc.... more 5 or 10fps for 300$
I want some real progress pls