XFX Radeon 5830 Review

Geekspeak411 - April 1, 2010
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Testing:

To look at a card is one thing, to see it’s software suite is another, but what it all boils down to is just straight performance numbers in an all out brawl between the XFX 5830 and the OCC benchmarking suite. I will push the 5830 to its absolute overclocking limit to see just how much can be gained performance wise and find out just where this card stands among its peers. One place where nVidia has the leg up on ATI immersion-wise is nVidia’s PhysX technology, to level the playing field, tests will be run with PhysX disabled, but keep that in mind as the carnage commences!

Processor: Intel Core I7 920 150x20
Motherboard: MSI X58 Platinum SLI
Memory: Mushkin HP3 12800 7-7-7-20
Video Card(s):XFX Radeon 5830
Power Supply: CoolerMaster 850 watt Real Power Pro power supply
Hard Drive: 1 x Western Digital 640GB 7200rpm SATA
Optical Drive: Asus DVD-RW
OS: Windows Vista Home Premium SP1 64bit
Case: Corsair Obsidian 800D

Comparison Video Cards:

Overclocking:

Overclocked settings:

XFX Radeon HD 5830 900/1200 MHz

After a little bit of research on similar chips, I got a feel of how far these little puppies can go. First off, whenever you are overclocking you want to set the fans to 100% to ensure you are getting the most stable environment possible. Heat is the enemy here, so anything you can do to get rid of it, the better! Now, getting to the software side of things is fairly easy. After opening up the CCC, all you have to do is navigate to the ATI Overdrive section. The software maxes out at 900MHz on the core and 1300 on the RAM, for our testing today, that should be plenty of playing space, should you want more however, there are other alternative utilities out there. Starting with 10Mhz increments, I slowly crept my way up to 900MHz testing each time using the integrated burn utility. Maxed out and stable on the core clock, I worked on the RAM. Again I slowly raised the speeds until I maxed out at 1200MHz. These overclocks are pretty huge improvements and should see some big gains in the benchmarks.