With AMD's Radeon HD 5000-series "Evergreen" graphics cards now ranging from the low-end HD 5450 right the way up to the extreme HD 5970, the GPU manufacturer seems to have most areas of the market covered.
There's still room for a new addition or two, however, and AMD will soon expand the HD 5800-series line with the introduction of the ATI Radeon HD 5830.
The card, squeezing in between the HD 5770 and HD 5850, is expected to be officially launched later this week but has been prematurely detailed in an official slide leaked by Chinese website IT168.
Positioned as an enthusiast card, the HD 5830 is based on the Cypress core featured in both the HD 5850 and HD 5870, and finds itself trimmed of a few features in order to fit in above HD 5770 in terms of performance.
Unfortunately for AMD, the above-leaked slide provides a detailed insight into the upcoming GPU's ability. The card's 1,120 stream processors indicate 14 SIMD units equipped with 80 SPs each, that's four units less than the HD 5850 and six fewer than the HD 5870. A reasonable trim, we reckon, and the card's core clock speed remains impressive at 800MHz.
The HD 5830's Achilles' heel, however, is likely to be the 50 per cent drop in Render Output Units (ROPs) - down from 32 in the HD 5850 to just 16 in the HD 5830. One would assume the card will struggle with high quantities of anti-aliasing and anisotropic filtering as a result.
Why cut the number of ROPs in half on an enthusiast card? We can't be certain, but looking at the above specification, it seems the HD 5830 could well be a HD 5870 core that didn't make the cut and found itself rebadged with fewer features. The card's maximum power draw of 175W - that's 24W more than the HD 5850 - certainly suggests this isn't a from-the-ground-up design.
With UK retailers suggesting a retail price of around £200 for a Radeon HD 5830, the card may well have its work cut out in competing against its own sibling, the £220 Radeon HD 5850. Stay tuned for a definitive verdict in the upcoming HEXUS.net review.
