PowerColor Plans to Unleash New Radeon HD 5830 and HD 5850

With the Southern Islands family of GPU from AMD just around the corner, its manufacturing partners are apparently quite bent on selling as many current-generation cards as possible, and PowerColor's latest strategy is to unveil more compact versions of its existing cards.

PowerColor has been selling its version of the ATI Radeon HD 5830 for a while, but this new one is smaller and has a different cooling solution.

Basically, the 'original' HD 5830 has a full-length PCB (printed circuit board) and a custom cooling solution with three heatpipes.

This newcomer, no doubt in order to strike a lower price point, has both a shorter PCB and a less formidable cooler, though still enough to keep the heat generation of the GPU under control.

To be more specific, the heatsink of the so-called HD5830 1GB GDDR5 V2 (AX5830 1GBD5-DHV2) has only two copper heatpipes.

As for the product specifications, the GPU runs at 800 MHz, whereas the 1GB of memory operates at 4,000 MHz and on an interface of 256 bits.

What's more, the board comes with 1,120 stream processors and support for all the expected ATI technologies, such as CrossFireX (for multi-GPU configurations).

Needless to say, like all of its HD 5000 Series siblings, the video controller fully supports DirectX 11 graphics as well.

Finally, for connectivity with a variety of monitors, PowerColor designed this model with a DVI, HDMI and DisplayPort outputs.

In related news, the hardware maker also prepared a HD 5850 card, with 725/4000 MHz speeds (GPU/Memory) and 1GB of VRAM.

Unfortunately, the prices of these adapters have not been disclosed, but this detail should surface soon, considering that availability is reportedly slated for next month.