Sapphire Radeon HD 5830 1GB Review

A Closer Look at the Sapphire Radeon HD 5830 1GB

For those of you suffering through a case of déjà vu right about now, we can sympathize with you since the Sapphire HD 5830 1GB is literally a spitting image of the HD 5850 Toxic we reviewed earlier this week. Naturally, there are quite a few differences between the two cards hiding under the massive heatsink shroud but upon first glance, they can easity be mistaken for one another.

Naturally, as with all new ATI cards the heatsink ends up being the dominating visual impact of this card with its massive expanse of black plastic and centrally mounted 90mm fan which covers up the aluminum cooling fin assembly. The downside to this design over other ATI cards on the market is the fact that it doesn’t exhaust much of the heat from the core outside of your case. However, this is almost a non-issue since the 40nm core on this card doesn’t generate all that much heat in the first place. We can also see that Sapphire also makes references to Modern Warfare 2 on the card itself with a small yet effective sticker.


While the HD 5850 Toxic and HD 5830 may look the same, there are some subtle differences which start with the heatsink. First of all, the plastic shroud on Sapphire’s HD 5830 1GB uses a different design and actually protrudes over the back of the PCB by a good ½” making this card slightly longer that its near-twin.


Getting a closer look, the fan reveals that the inner cooling assembly is also different since Sapphire chose not to use their more expensive Vapor-X cooler on the lower-end card. This means the HD 5830 uses a slightly smaller cooling fins assembly by replacing the fins directly over the core with a slab of aluminum instead. On the other hand, cooling could also be improved by the fact that two more heatpipes are used to whisk the heat away from the GPU.


As alluded to in the past paragraphs, the heatsink on this card makes use of five copper heatpipes that touch the main copper contact plate. These heatpipes then quickly move the heat away from the core and out to the aluminum fins where it is dispersed by the fresh air from the fan. We can also see that Sapphire chose to leave the memory ICs on this card free of any heatsinks since they are confident the downwards airflow created by the fan will be sufficient to cool them off.


The rearmost portion of the HD 5830 shows us a pair of 6-pin PCI-E power connectors since even though the specification of this card can’t hold a candle to those of the HD 5850, it consumes almost as much power. Meanwhile, the backplate houses a pair of DVI connectors as well as outputs for DisplayPort and HDMI giving this card Eyefinity compatibility.


When it comes to overall length of this card, things don’t look too great for those of you expecting a design that was more compact than the HD 5850. The Sapphire HD 5850 is about 10 1/2” from end to end which makes it longer than the HD 5850 but shorter than the HD 5870 and easily passes over the edge of a standard ATX motherboard. With the connectors placed at the back of the card, you will need about 11” of clear space within your case if you have any hope of installing this card.