March 31st, 2010
XFX Radeon HD5830 Video Card Review @ BenchmarkReviews
The XFX Radeon HD 5830 looks deceptively simple; it doesn’t even look like a new product. It doesn’t shout, “Hey, look at me. I’m new and different.” Every ATI Radeon HD 5000 series product launch until now has had a visually unique model range that you could point to and say, “That’s a 5770 or That’s a 5670.” ad infinitum it seemed for the last several months.
Now, with the release of almost a dozen new HD 5830 graphics cards in the last few weeks, there are hardly two HD5830 cards that look alike. It’s a stealth product in chameleon’s clothes. Well, Benchmark Reviews has one pinned down under the microscope, and we can all take a look at an actual retail video card, P/N HD-583X-ZNFV, from one of ATI’s newest major AIB partners, XFX.
Launch day for the ATI Radeon HD 5830 was a bit different than most; 90% of the dozens of reviews were of a card that would never be sold. The engineering prototypes that ATI supplied for the industry roll-out were all built on the HD 5870 reference design, because the 5830 needs more power than the 5850 voltage regulator modules could supply. Meanwhile, all the ATI Add-in-Board (AIB) partners were getting ready to release their own custom versions of the 5830. Most of them had their own custom designs for the 5870 and 5850 in the works, or on the market already, so it was supposed to be an easy matter to port the house design over to the 5830. (…)
