Radeon HD 5830 review - Introduction

For us as editors it's sometimes baffling to see how quickly things can change in the hardware industry. ATI crawled back on top roughly a year ago already with the famous Radeon HD series 4000. By the time Windows 7 was released last year in October, ATI already had the first DX11 class product ready BEFORE the Windows 7 launch. And sure, while the volume availability was lacking, at least they had a product out there. In the time in-between then and now, slowly and steadily ATI has been traveling that yellow brick road and was able to fortify the DX11 class graphics card segment with a product in every foreseeable segment. Today ATI will finish the lineup with the last product of the 5000 series before we see respin products.

Again, read this well, EVERY possible segment in the market after today has been addressed by ATI, whereas NVIDIA still needs to release their first card. And to me that is just baffling...

So where then was there still a gap in the market for ATI? Well, in-between the Radeon HD 5770 and Radeon 5850 there is room for another product. A product that would cost roughly 250 USD and performance wise would sit in-between the aforementioned graphics cards. So here's what ATI did, they took the sweet Radeon HD 5850, disabled three shader clusters, fooled around with the clocks a little and that's what is being released today as the Radeon HD 5830.

The Radeon HD 5830 will in many ways be an extremely attractive product when it comes to performance and features. A product that many of you have waited on, and even many more will wait a little longer on, as this is a card that is going to be very popular once it dips towards 200 USD. Let's go check it out and meet, look at, try and test out the all new Radeon HD 5830.