AMD’s Radeon HD 5830: A Filler Card at the Wrong Price

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• 7Enigma - Thursday, February 25, 2010 - link

  And as a follow-up, could you OC the 5830's core clock 50MHz and rerun one of the tests that has the 4890 beating it by 20%? I'm just wondering if the core clock is starving the card so badly that it's compounding the performance issue.

• geok1ng - Thursday, February 25, 2010 - link

  We should see more and more of these builds on future generations.
  Die yields are unpredictable, so a chip project should predict a product line with many degrees of performance.
  
  i wouldn't mind having 5890, 5880,5870,5860,5850,5840,5830,5820 and even a 5810, as long as all offer equivalent performance for the price asked, which is NOT the case here.
  
  As for the 5870E6, well, it is nice to have a 2GB card that is incapable of driving a 30" monitor. Either lower its price or make an arrangement for mass production of miniDP-Dual-link DVI adapters.
  
  If AMD is ready to start taking momentum on premium niche market spots, i suggest a Watercooled 5970E6 with 2GB per GPU 4GB total. As it stand it make more sense for a massive E6 setup to go the dual 5850 way, at least one would avoid adapters costs.

• AznBoi36 - Thursday, February 25, 2010 - link

  I'm actually very happy with AMD's lineup as it is. At least it's nowhere as confusing as Nvidia with all their re-branding and crap they've pulled.

• flipmode - Thursday, February 25, 2010 - link

  Quite simply, the price of this card is insulting and the performance is disappointing.
  
  It's slower than a 4890 but 20% more expensive? Ludicrous, ridiculous.
  
  AMD, this is not the way to treat your customers. I'm all for you making profit, but why don't you try to make some profit with a reasonably priced product?
  
  Just as important, how bout giving us some cards that don't suck? 5870 and 5850 are nice, but everything else you've released has been disappointing and overpriced.
  
  Thanks for the review Ryan.

• silverblue - Thursday, February 25, 2010 - link

  This card, if anything, is more like a 5810 (if one existed) than anything else. It's simply just too cut down; if they'd disabled two SIMDs it'd be far more deserving of its current price tag, and they could've resisted raising the core clock to compensate.
  
  The 4830 was far less cut down in comparison to the 4850.

• silverblue - Thursday, February 25, 2010 - link

  Just to add, if all of the 5830 dies are more defective than the 5850 dies, the question remains how defective they are. Some have to be good enough to the point where they just missed the cut for the 5850 but only have one additional defective SIMD, and it would be very nice to be able to unlock this. If that's not possible, couldn't AMD just release an interim product with 1280 SP/64 TU/24 ROP? They can't all be damaged to a similar degree.

• AznBoi36 - Thursday, February 25, 2010 - link

  I guess yields at 40nm are "that" bad.

• Scali - Thursday, February 25, 2010 - link

  "and in the case of OpenCL AMD doesn’t even distribute their OpenCL driver with the rest of their Catalyst driver set yet."
  
  You said it!
  I'm getting pretty annoyed by this right now.
  AMD had been promoting OpenCL for months, and driver release after driver release, I find NO OpenCL runtimes included.
  nVidia has offered OpenCL to end-users in their official WHQL driver releases since November last year.
  AMD end-users still have nothing, three months later. Which also means that developers can't release OpenCL applications to end-users with AMD hardware. And originally we were told that they would arrive in Q2 2009.
  Pretty ironic, when it was AMD that was promoting OpenCL all the time, and trying to paint nVidia as the evil proprietary Cuda guy, that was not going to support OpenCL.

• stmok - Thursday, February 25, 2010 - link

  According to this...
  => http://developer.amd.com/gpu/ATIStreamSDK/Pages/de...">http://developer.amd.com/gpu/ATIStreamSDK/Pages/de...
  ...OpenCL support for ATI cards began in ATI Catalyst 10.2 drivers.
  
  For Nvidia, OpenCL developer tools is here...
  => http://developer.nvidia.com/object/opencl.html">http://developer.nvidia.com/object/opencl.html
  
  Both AMD and Nvidia support OpenCL. Developer tools on both sides are available.

• leexgx - Thursday, February 25, 2010 - link

  OpenCL should come with the drivers no matter the size on http://game.amd.com/us-en/drivers_catalyst.aspx?p=...">http://game.amd.com/us-en/drivers_catalyst.aspx?p=...
  
  most may just stick with cuda at this time
  
  quite sure i have read some where that you need to code for Nvidia OpenCL as well as ATI OpenCL