Conclusion

The market success of any graphics card depends not only on its performance, noise, power consumption and frequency potential, but also on its pricing. Price is going to be the decisive factor for the Radeon HD 5830. As long as its recommended price is set at “below $250”, the card won’t be competitive at all. Its performance is considerably lower than that of the Radeon HD 5850 and but slightly higher than that of the Radeon HD 5770 although it is closer to the senior model in terms of recommended price. Moreover, Radeon HD 4890 and GeForce GTX 275 are widely available on the market. Although they don’t support DirectX 11, they are competitive to the HD 5830 in performance and cost much less.

On the other hand, we won’t voice our final verdict about the Radeon HD 5830 because the new card still has no official drivers and the particular sample we have tested will never go to shops. ATI’s partners may also surprise us by releasing pre-overclocked versions of the card. So, we will leave this issue open to return to it in a couple of months when serially made Radeon HD 5830 will have become available, supported by official drivers and at specific retail prices.