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.
Facebook
Twitter
RSS
148 Comments
View All Comments
7Enigma - Thursday, February 25, 2010 - link
And as a follow-up, could you OC the 5830's core clock 50MHz and rerun one of the tests that has the 4890 beating it by 20%? I'm just wondering if the core clock is starving the card so badly that it's compounding the performance issue.geok1ng - Thursday, February 25, 2010 - link
We should see more and more of these builds on future generations.Die yields are unpredictable, so a chip project should predict a product line with many degrees of performance.
i wouldn't mind having 5890, 5880,5870,5860,5850,5840,5830,5820 and even a 5810, as long as all offer equivalent performance for the price asked, which is NOT the case here.
As for the 5870E6, well, it is nice to have a 2GB card that is incapable of driving a 30" monitor. Either lower its price or make an arrangement for mass production of miniDP-Dual-link DVI adapters.
If AMD is ready to start taking momentum on premium niche market spots, i suggest a Watercooled 5970E6 with 2GB per GPU 4GB total. As it stand it make more sense for a massive E6 setup to go the dual 5850 way, at least one would avoid adapters costs.
AznBoi36 - Thursday, February 25, 2010 - link
I'm actually very happy with AMD's lineup as it is. At least it's nowhere as confusing as Nvidia with all their re-branding and crap they've pulled.flipmode - Thursday, February 25, 2010 - link
Quite simply, the price of this card is insulting and the performance is disappointing.It's slower than a 4890 but 20% more expensive? Ludicrous, ridiculous.
AMD, this is not the way to treat your customers. I'm all for you making profit, but why don't you try to make some profit with a reasonably priced product?
Just as important, how bout giving us some cards that don't suck? 5870 and 5850 are nice, but everything else you've released has been disappointing and overpriced.
Thanks for the review Ryan.
silverblue - Thursday, February 25, 2010 - link
This card, if anything, is more like a 5810 (if one existed) than anything else. It's simply just too cut down; if they'd disabled two SIMDs it'd be far more deserving of its current price tag, and they could've resisted raising the core clock to compensate.The 4830 was far less cut down in comparison to the 4850.
silverblue - Thursday, February 25, 2010 - link
Just to add, if all of the 5830 dies are more defective than the 5850 dies, the question remains how defective they are. Some have to be good enough to the point where they just missed the cut for the 5850 but only have one additional defective SIMD, and it would be very nice to be able to unlock this. If that's not possible, couldn't AMD just release an interim product with 1280 SP/64 TU/24 ROP? They can't all be damaged to a similar degree.AznBoi36 - Thursday, February 25, 2010 - link
I guess yields at 40nm are "that" bad.Scali - Thursday, February 25, 2010 - link
"and in the case of OpenCL AMD doesn’t even distribute their OpenCL driver with the rest of their Catalyst driver set yet."You said it!
I'm getting pretty annoyed by this right now.
AMD had been promoting OpenCL for months, and driver release after driver release, I find NO OpenCL runtimes included.
nVidia has offered OpenCL to end-users in their official WHQL driver releases since November last year.
AMD end-users still have nothing, three months later. Which also means that developers can't release OpenCL applications to end-users with AMD hardware. And originally we were told that they would arrive in Q2 2009.
Pretty ironic, when it was AMD that was promoting OpenCL all the time, and trying to paint nVidia as the evil proprietary Cuda guy, that was not going to support OpenCL.
stmok - Thursday, February 25, 2010 - link
According to this...=> http://developer.amd.com/gpu/ATIStreamSDK/Pages/de...">http://developer.amd.com/gpu/ATIStreamSDK/Pages/de...
...OpenCL support for ATI cards began in ATI Catalyst 10.2 drivers.
For Nvidia, OpenCL developer tools is here...
=> http://developer.nvidia.com/object/opencl.html">http://developer.nvidia.com/object/opencl.html
Both AMD and Nvidia support OpenCL. Developer tools on both sides are available.
leexgx - Thursday, February 25, 2010 - link
OpenCL should come with the drivers no matter the size on http://game.amd.com/us-en/drivers_catalyst.aspx?p=...">http://game.amd.com/us-en/drivers_catalyst.aspx?p=...most may just stick with cuda at this time
quite sure i have read some where that you need to code for Nvidia OpenCL as well as ATI OpenCL