AMD within the past year has released graphics cards in which not only compete with Nvidia’s price scheme but also obliterate Nvidia’s high end gaming graphics cards. So it is with no surprise that AMD continues to clear a path for the budget conscience user. AMD within the past year have proven themselves very successful with their 4000 series, as well as their 5000 series, which leads the market in performance to this day. Not only that, but the cards are much cheaper than the competing Nvidia card. Does this mean that AMD should slow down and sulk within their market as their CEO counts up even more money?
AMD says no to the above, and says yes to another DirectX11 card that is more geared towards the budget conscience gamer. You may remember the news article posted here at eTeknix about a new card unveiled at CES this year. On January 25th 2010, AMD is planning on releasing the HD5830 to narrow down performance margins between the 5770 and 5850. After all the performance gap here is quite large, so it would seem that a new card should be in order to narrow this bridge.
The new HD5830 will probably be a down clocked version of the HD5850 without GDDR5 memory, meaning that it will only have a 128-bit memory bus with GDDR3. This is where this writer believes that this card will have a bottleneck occur if it does at all. However some other sources state that it will be a down clocked version of an HD5850 with performance around that of an HD4890. So this quite possibly might be the DirectX 11 version of an HD4890 with GDDR5. The HD5830 should be Nvidia’s GTX280 competitor with a much smaller price tag.
Possible Aftermarket Cooler made by Thermalright for the HD5830
With prices of the 5000 series as of right now starting at $299.99+, the 5830 should allow the budget conscience to not feel so burdened by the costs of their graphics card. Some sources believe that the card might be available at sub $200 costs or a little bit above $200. Either way, the HD5830 is closer to being in reach for many more users than the HD5850.
