With the recent release of the Radeon HD 5600, 5500 and 5400 series, AMD has managed to fill the gap in almost every price segment of the discrete graphics card market. However, the company is known to have one more card in the pipeline that will fit between the $150 Radeon HD 5770 and $300 HD 5850 both in terms of price and performance.
Although there has been no official announcement, the upcoming Radeon HD 5830 is all but confirmed by now thanks to numerous leaks, the latest of which brings full specifications as well as a price tag. According to a European online retail listing cited by Fudzilla, the card should cost around 215€, or about 17% less than the average HD 5850 card on the other side of the Atlantic. This means that, if accurate, and the same price relationship is retained for the U.S. market, the upcoming card could sell for around $250.
Of course, this is nothing more than a simple conjecture, but the listing also offered some hard numbers that should give us a good idea of what to expect. The still-unannounced 5830 reportedly packs the same Cypress LE core used in Radeon HD 5850 cards, but with 1280 stream processors instead of 1440, and will be able to crank out 60 texels per clock rather than 72 on the 5850.
The memory configuration will remain the same, 1GB of GDDR5 memory operating at 1000MHz, but apparently the core clock has been upped from 725MHz on the 5850 to 750MHz. Physically the two cards will be very similar, possibly using the same PCB and cooler, and like all the Radeon HD 5000-series cards it will have Eyefinity support. The site offered no word on when we can expect these units to start shipping, but last we heard the Radeon HD 5830 was scheduled to debut next week, on February 18.
