The Radeon 5830 has the same size as the Radeon 5870, it is not a small card, allthough you would expect this because of the lower performance than the 5870. Compared to the cheap Radeon 5670, the Sapphire Radeon 5830 is a giant. The Radeon 5830 also requires two PCI-E power connectors, while the 5670 does not. The Radeon 5830 uses Samsung GDDR5 memory @2000MHz which is good for overclocking. This card was compared to the Ati Radeon HD 5870, 5770, 5750, 5670 and GeForce GTX 275, 260 and GTS 250.

Test Setup: A Core i7 920 @3.8GHz with ASUS RAmpage II Extreme motherboard and 3x2GB Crucial Ballistic Tracer 1600MHz DDR3 memory.

Temperatures were tested with FurMark, a torture testing tool. Test results were 36 degrees Celsius idle and 68 degrees Celsius under full load. Allthough the 5830 can be considerd a lesser card than the 5870 results should have been better.

Conclusion:ATI was looking to close the gap between the 5770 and 5850, it costs about 50% more than the 5770 but the perfomances only differ about 20%, it is a competent successor of The Radeon 4890, with the extras of DirectX11 and 40nm but it hasn't got the gaming horsepower of the 4890.

Overclocking: The Sapphire Radeon 5830 has a high overclocking potential, that resulted in a stable overclock of 875MHz for the GPU Core and 1160MHz for the GDR5 Memory, approximately 9% and 16% higher than the stock speed, respectively.

Benchmarks: 3DMark06, 3DMark Vantage, Colin McRae: Dirt 2, S.T.A.L.K.E.R: Call of Pripyat, Call of Duty: Modern Warfare 2, Left 4 Dead 2, Resident Evil 5, ARMA 2, Crysis Warhead, FurMark, FRAPS, GPU-Z.