Powercolor Radeon HD 5830 1GB Video Card Unboxing & First Look Linus Tech Tips
Linus Tech Tips
·Linus Tech Tips
·2010-05-08
·
1,426 words · ~7 min read
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okay so today I'm going to be having a quick look at the allnew ATI radon HD
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5830 this is a part that is positioned sort of between the
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5770 and the 5850 but it is more like a
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5800 series than a 5700 series hence the
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name so this is from powercolor it is a PCS plus which is I believe their
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branding for overclocked video cards it has 1 GB of gddr5 memory something about
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unleashing the gaming power and it also has DVI HDMI and DisplayPort like all
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of the other 5800 series cards so around at the back you can see it is powered by
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ATI radio on 5830 it has a 256bit memory
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interface PCI Express 2 direct X11
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stream technology supports Crossfire and it better for the price built in HDMI
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with 7.1 surround sound and all of this basically looks like the same stuff it's
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funny they didn't even mention ifinity here but ifinity is here so you can run
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up to three displays um I also have have a guide on how to set up ifinity you
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should probably check that out at some point and why don't we start getting
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this unpackaged okay the plastic is off it's
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naked sort of it's not oh I don't have a knife I never have a knife see and I
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think someone actually took the knife that I keep in this room so I'm going to
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go ahead and just like stab through the protective sticker with a pen just kind
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of yeah we're making things work there we go the box is officially
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opened and now it's naked no no it's
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still got another box see this is this is like an unbox box box bag in because
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there are lots of boxes and bags ah another bag okay well why don't we start
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with the accessories you got to be kidding
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me this I have never seen something like
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this before I thought maybe it was a a joke
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but I figured it out now this is a banana digital King best CDR 52x compact
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disc recordable from GOI digital it is a
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grade recordable TD and it is for
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high-speed driver so if you drive fast and you
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are uh okay so there's something some
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data burn to it I'm going to go ahead and assume that this is the latest
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drivers so for the first time ever I'm actually going to recommend installing
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the driver that comes on the CD because they clearly downloaded the latest
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driver off the ATI website burned it to a CD and there it is ready for your
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installation so thank you power color for actually the attention to detail of
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giving us the very latest drivers for this brand new card I'm going to assume
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that any future iterations of the 5830 are going to come with a real driver CD
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but uh that's still pretty funny all right so what's next next we have an an
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installation guide all right so the installation guide is quite long it's in
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a wide variety of languages it shows you how to install a graphics card in 8 * 2
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is 16 different languages and I'm going to go ahead and close that right back up
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while the cameraman tries to look at it oh hey I actually folded it out to the
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English side check that out so they have a 5750 there for their demo okay next in
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terms of accessories we have a part of the box that I can't figure out how to
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open oh it's actually like sealed in there
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okay and in here we have a crossfire bridge and a DVI to VGA adapter okay so
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not not a whole lot going on in there let's just put that back okay
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let's have a look at the card itself this is the exciting part now something
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to note about 5800 Ser or 5800 5830 cards is that
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there is no reference cooler design in fact there is no reference design so
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what a reference design is is it's a standardized PCB and a standardized heat
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sink that at says okay this is what we recommend that you use and most launch
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cards are actually like 99% of the time
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based on a reference design but ATI doesn't have a reference 5830 so the
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board Partners were left to come up with whatever they want in this case
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powercolor has put together a very attractive looking card it looks like a
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92mm fan with 1 2 3 count them four heat
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pipes coming out the top to spread the heat evenly throughout this fin
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Arrangement which we can actually see more clearly from this side so check
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that out so you got four heat pipes going across the core of the GPU and
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then they come out here here here and here for really good cooling that's
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actually kind of a neat shot you can see the structure of the heat syn there if
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you look down at it from that angle so this is a PCI Express 16x card all right
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you got a lot enough angles there oh I like this too check this out okay most
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cards for the 5800 Series have the VR RM
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or the voltage regulator module cooling integrated into the same metal chunk
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that cools the RAM as well as the GPU but you can see we've got a separate
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heat sink here and I actually prefer that method because vrms they get hot
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but they don't actually produce a lot of heat so as long as you've got some
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incidental air flow and a separate a nice well secured you can see they've
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got actually three pegs through this thing to make sure it stays nice and well attached heat sink you can actually
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remove more heat that way can you see that pretty good awesome two PCI Express
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16x connectors and I don't like this these this is quite a long card actually
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and you can see that these are coming out this side so that means you have to account for an additional like you know
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couple centimeters out the back of the card to make sure that it can fit in your case I mean as long as you've got a
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pretty good performance case that's nice and long then you should be all right
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okay RAM so it has 1 gig of RAM and you can see the RAM is actually not directly
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cooled but it's all positioned underneath that 92 mm fan so I wouldn't
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worry about that getting hot at all all
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at the top of the card we find two Crossfire fingers okay remember when
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you're running two cards it's actually you can see better performance if you
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just use one crossfire bridge and then at the back of the card there's not a
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whole lot to talk about the whole heat sink assembly is held on by four screws
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okay four screws actually those are kind
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of funny okay they're slot screws you can just use a slot screwdriver for that
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okay never mind nothing don't look at that okay here we have DisplayPort HDMI
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and DVI so the the old 5800 series cards
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usually had two dvis right here and here but you can just use DVI and HDMI to DVI
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cable or adapter remember they are in terms of signal they are identical so
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there's no quality loss there's nothing like that and then DisplayPort if you
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want to run a third monitor you will need either a DisplayPort monitor or an
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active DisplayPort to DVI adapter you can't just use a like a passive cable
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and then they've actually got I like this too they've got actual slots here
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for the air Escape out of your case even though based on the design of the cooler
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I can tell you already that not all of the air will be directed in this
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direction a lot of it will go here a lot of it will go here but at least we're exhausting some air thank you for
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checking out my exhausting unboxing speaking of exhausting of the radon HD
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5830