Even though the Radeon HD 5000 series has expanded to eight parts since its September 2009 introduction, AMD appears to have one more part left: Chinese website IT168 has today “leaked” slides that completely detail the Radeon HD 5830.
Designed as an enthusiast GPU (as all 58xx adapters are), the 5830 is intended to fit between the 5770 and the 5850 in terms of performance. It accomplishes this role by cutting the 5850’s stream processor count from to 1120 from 1440, and its ROPs–the hardware unit which puts pixels on the screen, as well as anti-aliasing and anisotropic filtering–from 32 to 16.
Through these changes, the card will certainly be faster than the 5770, but slower than the 5850, particularly when it comes to post-processing techniques like AA and AF.
There is, however, an aberration in the spec sheet: Even though the 5830 features fewer stream processors and fewer ROP units than the 5850, its max board power is 24W higher. The only way to explain this anomaly is to suggest that the 5830 is a failed 5870, with architectural elements that have been “disabled” to make a good card out of a failed one. Disabled silicon still takes power. Had the 5830 been designed as a unique chip, we’d find that it max power draw–like its performance–would fall in between the 5850 and 5770.
In the end, however, the Ps and Qs of the design are relatively immaterial. The 5830 will offer better performance than the 5770 at a pricepoint lower than that of the 5850, and nobody is going to argue with having a wide variety of options for all budget and performance considerations.
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