Sapphire Radeon HD 5830 1GB Review

Heat & Acoustics

For all temperature testing, the cards were placed on an open test bench with a single 120mm 1200RPM fan placed ~8” away from the heatsink. The ambient temperature was kept at a constant 22°C (+/- 0.5°C). If the ambient temperatures rose above 23°C at any time throughout the test, all benchmarking was stopped. For this test we use the 3DMark Batch Size test at it highest triangle count with 4xAA and 16xAF enabled and looped it for one hour to determine the peak load temperature as measured by GPU-Z.

For Idle tests, we let the system idle at the Vista desktop for 15 minutes and recorded the peak temperature.


To begin with, the temperatures seen here are simply amazing due to Sapphire’s use of an extremely high end cooler on their HD 5830. This cooling performance is backed up by the fact that the 90mm fan sitting at the center of the heatsink keeps noise to a minimum as well. Indeed, this is a very, very quiet card.

Power Consumption

For this test we hooked up our power supply to a UPM power meter that will log the power consumption of the whole system twice every second. In order to stress the GPU as much as possible we once again use the Batch Render test in 3DMark06 and let it run for 30 minutes to determine the peak power consumption while letting the card sit at a stable Windows desktop for 30 minutes to determine the peak idle power consumption. We have also included several other tests as well.

Please note that after extensive testing, we have found that simply plugging in a power meter to a wall outlet or UPS will NOT give you accurate power consumption numbers due to slight changes in the input voltage. Thus we use a Tripp-Lite 1800W line conditioner between the 120V outlet and the power meter.


Power consumption is a bit odd to say the least with the HD 5830 showing power consumption under load which is quite a bit higher than the HD 5770 and almost catches up to the numbers posted by the HD 5850. Idle results seem to be influenced by component choices on this card as it requires almost power as a HD 5870. However, we have to remember that every one of these ATI cards is extremely efficient especially when you compare the HD 5830 to the outgoing HD 4890 1GB.