Lab Report – HIS Radeon HD5830 Turbo iCooler V 1GB

Manufacturer: HIS
Product: Radeon HD5830 Turbo iCooler V 1GB
Price: approx £222 (inc VAT)

Specification [full specifications here]
Clock speeds
Core: 840MHz
Memory: 1.1GHz (4.4GHz effective)
Memory: 1GB GDDR5
Bandwidth: 140.8GB/s

Introduction

With AMD aiming to offer a 40nm DirectX 11 part for every market segment, the Radeon HD5830 is the latest and possibly the last member of the 5 series of cards and is aimed at filling the gap in both price and performance between the Radeon HD5770 and the Radeon HD5850 series of cores.

Architecture

The HD5830 uses a new LE version of the original Cypress core but while it may still have 2.15 billion transistors on a 334mm² die of the first Cypress GPU’s, a large chunk of the stream processors have been disabled so instead of the 1,600 of the HD5870, the HD5830 has to make do with a paltry 1,120. This together with the reduced number of render units really hits the pixel fillrate of the new core.

To make up for this the core engine clock has been increased to 800MHz with the 1GB of GDDR5 memory running via a 256-bit bus at 1,000MHz (4,000MHz effective), giving a memory bandwidth of 128.0GB/s.

Power

With a peak power load of 175 watts, which is a fair bit higher than the 151 watts of the HD5850, somewhat of a surprise seeing as though the HD5830 isn’t as powerful a card as the HD5850, the power requirements are beyond what the PCI-E slot can deliver (75 Watts) so the HD5830 needs to make full use of the two 6-pin PCI-E power connectors on the PCB.

HIS Radeon HD5830 iCooler V Turbo 1GB

The Radeon HD5830 iCooler V Turbo 1GB is the flagship model in HIS’s HD5830 family line-up and as with all their cards carrying the Turbo logo, it’s factory overclocked out of the box. As with all the cards in the range it also uses one of HIS’s iCooler V coolers to keep everything nice and cool.

Clock Speeds

The factory tweaking adds another 40MHz to the reference core engine speed (840MHz) while the memory clock gains another 100MHz so it runs at 1,100MHz (4,400MHz effective) giving a 140.8GB/s memory bandwidth.

Cooling

HIS are well know for adding non reference deisgn coolers to thier cards and the HD5830 Turbo is no exception, using the V version of the iCooler which first saw the light of day on the HD5870.  The heatsink design is something of a surprise as there isn’t a heatpipe in sight, instead there is a large copper contact plate on top of which sits an aluminium block with very tightly spaced cooling fins. The middle of the array of fins has been desigined to allow the 80mm dual bearing cooling fan to sit snuggly in the middle. The fan draws in cool air directly to the cooling fins while the hot air is exhausted through the grill in the I/O plate and out of the rear of the card.

I/O Back Plate

There are no surprises when it comes to the ports that are fitted to the HD5830 Turbo, two Dual Link DVI ports and single HDMI and DisplayPorts and of course it supports ATI’s Eyefinity technology.

Box Contents

The only real thing to note with the bundled hardware with the card is a redeemable voucher for Call of Duty: Modern Warfare 2 (via Steam). The rest of it is pretty much standard fare; two 4-pin Molex to 6-pin PCI-E power adapters, a CrossFireX bridge, DVI-VGA adapter and a driver disc.

Performance

(full results here)

Built in benchmark, small farm map run 4 times, in game settings set to very high