AMD Radeon 5850 and 5830 Live, Sapphire Pushes them to Xtreme

It looks like not all of AMD's partners are willing to give up on the Radeon HD 5000 series, or the 5800 line in this case, as Sapphire looked back and decided to bring a pair of those adapters closer to our times.

At present, consumers and IT players alike mostly refer to the AMD Radeon HD 5000 series as the old generation, what with 6000 series cards out and about.

Considering that not too many months ago there weren't any 6000 board out on sale, seeing 5000 boards as old could actually come across as a bit odd.

Sapphire may or may not have had this in mind when it brought forth its two newest video controllers.

Basically, the company boldly stepped forth and delivered the HD 5850 Xtreme and HD 5830 Xtreme, both of which should start selling before this month (April, 2011) is out.

For those that need to refresh their memory, the HD 5800 series was the high-end set of 5000 boards, position equivalent to the HD 6900.

The HD 5830 Xtreme is, obviously, the weaker of the two, but it sill features a memory clock of 800 MHz for the GPU (graphics processing unit) and 4,000 for the 1 GB of GDDR5 VRAM.

The product also comes with a memory interface of 256 bits, 1,120 SPs (stream processors), plus DVI, HDMI and DisplayPort outputs and support for CrossFireX,

Meanwhile, the 5850 Xtreme has 1,440 Stream Processors and frequencies of 775 MHz and 4,000 MHz for the GPU and VRAM (also 1GB), respectively.

Other than that, it boasts the same memory interface and connectivity capabilities as its sibling.

Finally, both newcomer have full support for the CrossFireX technology, which lets one set up multi-GPU configurations.

Sales should commence this month, for prices of £80 inc vat (5830) and £100 inc vat (5850), according to reviews.