Visually, the new Radeon is not at all different from the stronger HD 5850. The cards are the same in length, use the same “cut-off” cooler which will occupy the adjacent slot on the motherboard as well, and sporting two DVI, one HDMI and one DisplayPort output on the back side. Technological support is also identical to the card’s older brethren – DirectX 11, OpenGL 3.2, OpenCL 1.0 and Eyefinity, the new technology enabling the use of multiple monitors to create a single display array, are all supported. The card itself was based on harvested chips meant for stronger cards which were dysfunctional in some way; the problematic parts were switched off, but the rest is technically fully capable and functional.

As a refresher, the strongest family member, HD 5870, has a total of 1600 stream processors. The somewhat weaker HD 5850 has 1440, while the Cypress LE chip on the new HD 5830 has “only” got 1120. While the two stronger models have 32 ROP units, the HD 5830 only has 16, which suggests that the card won’t cope with high levels of antialiasing and anisotropic filtering as easily. The number of texture units was reduced as well, being cut from 80 and 72, respectively, down to 56. This may lead to the conclusion that the card is too close to the HD 5700 models, but the 256-bit memory bus, used to communicate with GDDR5 memory, remains unscathed, which leaves effective throughput at a far higher rate than the HD 5700 models, with their 128-bit bus width. This secures Radeon HD 5830’s place in the high resolution category, albeit antialiasing and anisotropic filtering modes will be more taxing than otherwise, as already stated. It should also be noted that the GPU is clocked at a notably higher frequency than is the case on the HD 5850 (800 versus 725 MHz), which partially compensates for the difference in stream processor count, making the difference in raw processing power between HD 5830 and 5850 smaller than the one between the two strongest models. A higher frequency unfortunately called for slightly higher power consumption as well, so the declared TDP for the new card is 175 W under full load, unlike 5850’s 151 W. On a comforting note, the desktop (2D) mode consumption is actually a tad lower, 25 W on the 5830 versus 27 W on the 5850, which is a negligible addendum to the total power consumption of the rest of the PC anyway.