XFX Radeon HD 5830 Video Card Review

XFX Radeon HD 5830 (Cont’d)

The active heatsink that comes with this video card has a very interesting shape, but the cooler doesn’t touch the memory chips, as you can see in Figure 5.

Figure 5: Cooler doesn’t touch the memory chips.

You can see the cooler removed from the video card in Figure 6. The base is made of copper using two thick copper heatpipes to transfer the heat produced by the graphics chip to the aluminum fins.

Figure 6: GPU cooler.

In Figure 7, you can see the video card with the heatsink removed. This card uses four iron chokes on its voltage regulator circuit, which are inferior to ferrite models. On the other hand, all capacitors are solid. On the top part of the card you can see the two CrossFireX connectors. Also notice that this video card requires two six-pin auxiliary power connectors.

Figure 7: Video card with heatsink removed.

The reviewed card uses eight 1 Gbit GDDR5 chips, making its 1 GB video memory. The chips used are K4G10325FE-HC04 parts from Samsung, which support up to 1.25 GHz (5 GHz QDR) and since on this video card memory is accessed at 1 GHz (4 GHz QDR), there is a good margin for you to increase the memory clock rate keeping the chips inside the maximum they support.

Figure 8: Memory chip.

In Figure 9, you can see the accessories that come with the reviewed card: two installation guides, a doortag, one driver installation CD, two power adapters, one DVI-to-VGA adapter and one CrossFireX bridge. The video card also comes with a voucher with downloading instructions and serial number for a complete copy of “Aliens vs. Predator” game.

Figure 9: Accessories.

Before seeing the performance results, let’s recap the main features of this video card.