Introduction

AMD released their Radeon HD 5830 Series in late February this year. The card is based on the same Cypress GPU as on the Radeon HD 5850 and HD 5870, but in order to reach their performance target, AMD has disabled some shader units as well as two ROP units. This results in a card that is roughly comparable to HD 4890 in performance, but offers all the new features from the HD 5000 Series like EyeFinity and DirectX 11.

MSI uses their well known TwinFrozr II cooler on this card, the specifications have remained the same however.

Packaging

MSI's package is dominated by blue with a very sexy picture of the card on the front. You will find further product detail on the back.

Contents

You will receive:

• Graphics card
• Driver CD + Quick Install Guide
• DVI to D-Sub Adapter
• 2x PCI-Express power cables

The Card

MSI uses their TwinFrozr II cooler on this card which has been seen on other HD 5000 products too. It uses two fans that are both temperature-controlled.


The card occupies two slots in your system.


The card has a DVI port, one HDMI port, and one DisplayPort.

For HDMI Audio, NVIDIA requires you to feed an external audio source, for example from your motherboard's on-board audio, to the card via SPDIF cable. AMD on the other hand has integrated a sound device inside their GPUs which is the easier solution for most users. Also AMD's integrated sound device has been upgraded to support HDMI 1.3a which includes Dolby TrueHD, DTS-HD, AC-3, DTS and up to 7.1 channel audio with 192 kHz / 24-bit.


CrossFire configurations with up to four cards are supported, you may also mix cards from different vendors in your CrossFire setup.


Here are the front and the back of the card, high-res versions are also available (front, back). If you choose to use these images for voltmods etc, please include a link back to this site or let us post your article.