ATI Radeon HD 5830 - Plugging The Performance Gap, Again
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Temperature, Power Consumption & Overclocking
Temperature
Our trio of Radeon HD 5830 cards all came with customized cooling solutions, so it was interesting to see which was most effective. The Gigabyte HD 5830 and MSI R5830 Twin Frozr II did the best in our temperature test, as both managed around 55 degrees Celsius. Since there's no reference version of the Radeon HD 5830 from ATI to act as a baseline, it's difficult to say how effective the coolers are. Nevertheless, 55 degrees Celsius is an ideal reading in our books. The HIS HD 5830 iCooler V Turbo recorded 64 degrees Celsius, which is substantially more than its competitors, but was somewhat expected due to its overclocked nature and its single fan design.
Power Consumption
Despite the hardware reduction, the power consumption figures we recorded from our triplet of Radeon HD 5830 cards were comparable to that of the Radeon HD 5850. We suspect this is due to the Radeon HD 5830's higher reference clock speeds. If you recall, a reference Radeon HD 5830 is running at 800MHz at the core, whereas the Radeon HD 5850 is only running at 725MHz. Add to that is the same GPU core used on the 5850 and 5830 models, the results are quite apparent. That said, all three Radeon HD 5830 cards recorded roughly the same figures.
Overclocking
What impressed us about the Radeon HD 5830 was its overclocking abilities. With a stock clock of 800MHz at the core, it was amazing that all three cards managed to go well beyond 900MHz. The HIS HD 5830 iCooler V Turbo was our top performer here, managing as astonishing 980MHz at the core and 52000MHz DDR at the memory. This allowed it to score 7569 3DMarks on the Extreme preset, which surpasses even the Radeon HD 5850.
As for the other two Radeon HD 5830 cards, we are pleased to say that the MSI R5830 Twin Frozr II did well too, managing 970MHz at the core and 4900MHz DDR at the memory with some tweaking using its bundled Afterburner overclocking utility. And finally, the Gigabyte HD 5830, though last in our roundup, managed a commendable 940MHz at the core and 4600MHz DDR for the memory.
