Sapphire Radeon HD 5830 Extreme

This morning Sapphire Technology is announcing a new Radeon graphics card. It's not though part of the Radeon HD 6000 series that has recently seen the launch of the Radeon HD 6790 or even the Radeon HD 6450, but rather it's a Cypress-based part. Yes, as in the Radeon HD 5800 series. This new graphics card is the Sapphire Radeon HD 5830 Extreme and it has designed to deliver the best performance for the ~$120 USD price point. Here is our look at this new graphics card with accompanying Linux benchmarks.

The Radeon HD 5830 graphics processor was originally introduced by AMD back in February of 2010, but Sapphire is launching their new Extreme version of this "Cypress LE" graphics card at a time when the costs are down as the Radeon HD 6000 series is becoming mainstream. Sapphire says this HD 5830 re-launch will be exclusive to them and that they have obtained aggressive prices. This new graphics card has DVI / HDMI / DisplayPort outputs to support three displays via Eyefinity, 1GB of video RAM, a new heatpipe-based cooling solution, optimized voltage regulation circuitry, etc.

Sapphire views this Radeon HD 5830 Extreme as a compelling offer since its performance is said to be superior to NVIDIA's GeForce GTX 550 while it costs less than a GeForce GTX 560 as being their mid-range competition. In other words, a great price vs. performance ratio at $129 USD. The Sapphire Radeon HD 5830 Extreme is actually coming in cheaper than the existing Radeon HD 5830 cards from AMD's other AIB partners that are retailing on average for more than $150 USD at major Internet retailers.

The GPU itself is effectively the same as what's been shipping since last year with it being a 40nm ASIC that supports OpenGL 3.2 / DirectX 11, Eyefinity, ATI Stream, PCI Express 2.0, 256-bit GDDR5 video memory, HDMI 1.3, CrossFireX compatible, OpenCL 1.0, and UVD2 / Avivo HD. The GPU has an 800MHz clock with 4000MHz memory clock.

The packaging for the Sapphire Radeon HD 5830 was similar to that of Sapphire's other products. Included with the PCI Express graphics card was a Windows driver CD, Sapphire Select Club card, a brief user's manual, a VGA to DVI dongle, and two molex to 6-pin PCI Express power adapters.