ATI Radeon HD 5830 Specs Cut a Few Too Many Corners

Posted 02/23/2010 at 2:01pm | by Bart Salisbury

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Sometimes cheap signifies a bargain--high quality for a low price. Other times cheap is just that--cheap. And it looks like ATI’s new Radeon HD 5830 might just fall into this latter category.

Pegged to hit the market at about $250, the HD 5830 was viewed by some as a bargain alternative to the HD 5850. Perhaps a little less powerful, but still a big bang for your graphics card buck. Unfortunately, if the specs posted at IT168.com bear up, the HD 5830 isn’t going to just a little less powerful. According to these specs, hardware-wise the HD 5830 will have 320 fewer stream processors, 16 fewer texture units, and 16 fewer ROPs than its bigger sibling. That translates to a performance hit of 7.4 GTexels/s, 10.4 Gpixel/s, and 41.6 GSample/s. All this despite a core clock speed of 800MHz.

All-in-all, the HD 5830 looks a bit more like the HD 5770 than the HD 5850, except it sucks up a whole lot more power--more even than the HD 5850.

Lars-Göran Nilsson, of SemiAccurate, is disappointed by these specs, but isn’t really surprised: “AMD wouldn’t want the HD 5830 to be too close to the HD 5850 in terms of performance, as then the sales of HD 5850 cards would drop.”

The HD 5830 is expected to be launched in a couple of days. If the news is bad at least we don’t have long to wait for confirmation.

Image Credit: Lars-Göran Nilsson/SemiAccurate