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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Paladin1211 - Thursday, February 25, 2010 - link
No, the 4890 is a revised version of the 4870 with slight changes in architecture design. It's not an overclocked 4870 as you may think :)Lurker911 - Thursday, February 25, 2010 - link
What architectural change? Point me to the source of this info. So far from what I read, there are no changes to the rendering architecture. the chip design is a little improved to reduce leakage and allow higher clocks speeds.Lurker911 - Thursday, February 25, 2010 - link
From anandtech's own article: 4890 vs gtx275"The Radeon HD 4890 is the designated successor of the HD 4870 and now AMD's fastest single GPU graphics card. This isn't reached with fundamental changes but with increased clock speeds."
silverblue - Thursday, February 25, 2010 - link
..and it'd be nice if AMD did the same with their CPUs ;)silverblue - Thursday, February 25, 2010 - link
I wish AMD would release tweaked versions of its Phenom II CPUs like ATi do with their graphics... :)arnavvdesai - Thursday, February 25, 2010 - link
I think you mean its >400$Kibbles - Thursday, February 25, 2010 - link
With the paper launch and not so good pricing, I'm thinking AMD doesn't really want this to be a good selling product. Just decent enough so they can sell off the defective chips. They're probably stocking up even after this launch anticipating a better yield from TSMC later this year. All the while selling it for a sellable price.Also on page 2
"The 5850E6 is the 6 port mini-DisplayPort card that AMD was using to drive their 6 monitor and 24 monitor setups during the event."
I think you meant 5870E6.
Xtrafresh - Thursday, February 25, 2010 - link
I'm really intrigued by that XFX design, and how short it is. That could actually be a very nice card to be built into portable LAN-rigs or cases that simply dont have a gazilion feet of space to place cards.Is it possible to ask XFX these questions:
1) hoe long exactly is this card going to be?
2) is it going to have the same MSRP as other 5830s, or can that price be undercus because of smaller PCBs and less components needed?
3) did they make any compromises in terms of memory or power delevery circuitry to get to this small size?
I'm intrigued...
Ryan Smith - Thursday, February 25, 2010 - link
To be honest, I didn't pay too much attention to the vendor pictures (and I should have). I'm going to ask XFX about that; that really looks like a Photoshop session gone mad.Ryan Smith - Thursday, February 25, 2010 - link
And just to reply to myself while waiting on a response from XFX, I found a picture of their 5750. It's identical to the 5830.http://www.xfxforce.com/ecms.ashx/85995634-6395-4e...">http://www.xfxforce.com/ecms.ashx/85995...rdModels...