Between the AMD Premium Graphics class ATI Radeon HD 5570 and the AMD Enthusiast class ATI Radeon HD 5850 exists a price and performance wasteland. The jump in performance between the two is left filled by last generation products, going out of stock as the product line is replaced (i.e. ATI Radeon HD 4890) or supplies cut short (a.k.a. 'TSMC problems' for the NVIDIA GeForce GTX 275). Enter the Cypress LE - AMD's ATI Radeon HD 5830! In this article, we'll take a look at the HD 5830's reference design, to see if its a worthy addition to AMD's Enthusiast class of GPUs.

Designed to fill the $200 - $250 USD SEP point, AMD's ATI Radeon HD 5830 is intended to round out the AMD Enthusiast class, already ably populated by the Cypress Pro and XT models, a.k.a. the AMD ATI Radeon HD 5850 and HD 5870 cards.

Almost 7 months from introducing the first Evergreen series GPU, AMD have delivered a top-to-bottom stack of eleven DirectX 11 and Eyefinity, and now Stereoscopic 3D, capable add-in boards. Using the yield binned Cypress ASICs sent to them directly by AMD, partners are able to design their own boards and coolers to provide custom AMD ATI Radeon HD 5830 solutions.

Engineering Sample AMD ATi Radeon HD 5830

Product Highlights

• $239 MSRP

• 800MHz 40nm Cypress Core

• 2.1Bn Transistors

• 14 SIMD / 1120 STREAM Processors

• 56 TUs / 16 ROPs

• 1GB GDDR5 @ 1000MHz (4.0Gbps)

• 25W idle / 175W load

• 1.79 TFLOPS Compute Performance

Today we compare the AMD ATI Radeon HD 5830 with its big brother, the HD 5850. The Radeon HD 5830 is closer in performance to the HD 5850 than the HD 5850 itself is to the flagship HD 5870, begging this question: is AMD's ATI Radeon HD 5830 the new Price/Performance hero of the AMD 5-series Enthusiast line up? Lets look further to find out!