ATI 5830 launched, baffled looks follow

Thursday 25th February 2010, 03:21:00 PM, written by Alex Voicu

You may have thought that ATI had already rounded up its line-up fairly nicely, managing full top-to-bottom coverage. In fact, that's what we thought, until today when a new SKU was thrown into the fray in the form of the HD 5830. "Thrown into" is more descriptive than you think, since ATI won't be providing a reference design for this one - it will just be giving AIBs the chips, allowing them to go wild.

The 5830 is based on a harvested Cypress die that had to yield 6 of its SIMDs to the angry fab gods residing over at TSMC HQ, also forfeiting half of its RBEs on the very same altar. That being said, apparently mercy was shown in the end and its memory bus width escaped the culling, remaining the same 256-bits its elder brethren had enjoyed. In light of this, we can't help but wonder exactly what the relationship between the RBEs and the memory controllers is, but that's a topic for another day.

Summing up, that means that for ~$239USD you get a 14 SIMD Cypress clocked at 800 MHz for engine and 1000 MHz (4000GT/s) for memory respectively, with all the other things you've come to expect from the chip, with full DX11 capability, OpenCL support with double precision capability and Eyefinity being the stand out features. You also get the same apetite for power, so be sure you have 2 6-pin connectors ready and waiting. There's a slight upwards variation in terms of maximum board power (175 W versus 151 W for the 5850), as a consequence of bumping the engine clock - since this is a harvested part, it's likely that the disabled bits are at most fused off, so they're still powered and thus still leak at the transistor level.

Reviews can be found all around the web, which is less than can be said about significant enthusiasm around the part. The consensus seems to be that the MSRP is a tad on the high side, and it appears that at least in spots performance is a bit underwhelming, failing to match the HD 4890 it's supposed to replace for the money. Our friends over at Rage3D had a few things to say about it, so that's a good place to start your explorations if you're interested.

Update: The Tech Report followed up with their look, too.

Discuss on the forums

Tagging

ati ± radeon, cypress, eyefinity, dx11

Related ati News

ATI shoots a Bolt through its GPU compute stack
AMD releases CodeXL 1.0
ATI 69xx Series launches - Crocodile Dundee beware
ATI 68xx Series Launches
ATI releases OpenGL4.0 preview driver, for great justice
ATI Cypress Gaming Performance Analysis
ATI Catalyst 10.1 Display Driver
ATI Radeon HD 5670 released, bringing DX11 for less than $100
ATI 5970 comes out to play, completes ATI's lineup
AMD OpenCL development platform for CPU and GPU