Today Sapphire has announced their latest piece of graphics goodness, the HD5830 Xtreme. The new HD5830 Xtreme is a reintroduction of sorts as the HD5830 has been on the market for some time now with prices hovering around the $160 mark on average depending on the bells and whistles included. We are told that street pricing of the new HD5830 Xtreme will hit around 129.99 U.S. Dollars, placing it solidly in the mainstream category. A low price is great, but low performance is not, so we will be putting the HD5830 Xtreme through its paces to determine if it truly does offer performance beyond its pricing.Initial Thoughts
The HD5830 Xtreme comes packaged in a shiny black and gold box with the usual abundance of logo’s and graphics. According to Sapphire, this part belongs to AMD Black Series of products. When it comes to graphics cards in this price range, board partners do not have the margins available to elaborately package these products like they do on their high end enthusiast offerings, so there are no extraneous flaps or see-through windows like we might find on higher end products. Inside the outer shell is a non-descript cardboard box inside which you will find the card itself cradled inside a cardboard tray and underneath the tray lays the accessory box. The interior packaging as a whole is rather bland and utilitarian, but does its job protecting the card during shipping. From a consumer standpoint as long as the graphics card I just paid for arrives safely, I could care less about the packaging it arrived in. I would much rather have them spend that money on the card’s design and feature set as opposed to a pretty box that I will just be recycling shortly after my card is installed. The bundle with the HD5830 Xtreme is equally minimalistic and utilitarian. Included are two power connectors, a DVI to VGA adapter, driver CD, case sticker and instruction manual. Essentially you get what you need to get the job done and little more.SpecificationsAt the heart of the HD5830 Xtreme is a Cypress graphics core running at 800MHz. Also along for the ride are 1120 stream processors (480 cores disabled) and 56 texture units (24 disabled). The card sports a full 1GB of GDDR5 running at an effective rate of 4GHz (four operations per clock, so called Quad Data Rate). At first glance, there are no tangible differences in specs when compared to the original HD5830. Card LayoutThe cooling duties of the HD5830 Xtreme are handled by single fan resting atop a heatpipe/fin array. Three large copper heatpipes are positioned directly over the GPU drawing heat into the fin array where it is directly cooled by the fan.
Sapphire HD5830 Xtreme features triple-heatpipe arrangement with fin heatsink on both sides, all cooled by a single fan
The HD5830 Xtreme supports AMD Eyefinity 3 or essentially a three display support (for up to 7680x1600 pixel resolution). To accomplish this, the card unsurprisingly features three display connectors including DVI, HDMI and a DisplayPort. One thing to note is that the HDMI connector is 1.3a, not 1.4a which further explains the lack of AMD HD3D support.
Side view reveals simple bracket: single DVI, HDMI and mini-DisplayPort
Power is delivered to the card via six pin power connectors located on the outside edge of the card, a location similar to the 6800 series of cards.
© 2009 - 2013 Bright Side Of News*, All rights reserved.
