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The Official 5830 Thread!

Excellent neat, concise write-up - thanks for that Muel.

It looks like perhaps a few of those titles could do with crossfire Catalyst Application Profiles.

Love the case pic - great that you have a small gap between the cards and your fan setup looks to work well.
 
finally someone who has 5830's :) there such good cards imo i got a batmobile xfx one of the old bay for £110 including p&p sits at 60c under full load most of the time, never above 70c @ 900/1200 @ 50% fan speed, does a great job
 
spirits247 said:
Excellent neat, concise write-up - thanks for that Muel.

It looks like perhaps a few of those titles could do with crossfire Catalyst Application Profiles.

Love the case pic - great that you have a small gap between the cards and your fan setup looks to work well.
Click to expand...
I have the latest 11.2 Drivers now with the new CAPs installed. Not had chance to check it out yet but I will do soon and then I'll be able to tell if the dreaded microstutter has gone again.

Cheers for the case comment, it works really well! As you know these coolers are immense, so even though they're clocked to their limit, they only get to about 70C tops! I have a few plans for this build now, but it all makes tiny differences so I probably won't bother. Got some more braided extensions to go in when I get a chance, and at some point want to spray it all black.

powelly2010 said:
finally someone who has 5830's :) there such good cards imo i got a batmobile xfx one of the old bay for £110 including p&p sits at 60c under full load most of the time, never above 70c @ 900/1200 @ 50% fan speed, does a great job
Click to expand...
There used to be a load of regulars in this thread, think they've moved on. :(

They got a really bad press when they came out because the price was silly high, then they never really sold well. The prices dropped once then sales picked up a bit, (when I bought my first one), then they dropped the prices massively to clear the stock in time for the 6*** series.

The only downside to my ones is the stock voltage is locked, and locked pretty low. Great for cooling, not so great for overclocking. Still, 875/1100 daily and 900/1125 bench isn't bad really.
 
No idea, it's just been sat there heating my room since I got the second card. For the £90 I paid for the second card though it was worth it.

I would go for a multi-card setup again, but only because I think cases with 1 card look bare and sad. I'll be going Intel/Nvidia next time anyway I think, fancy a change.

I won't be spending money on computer stuff for a good while yet though. This current setup is fairly beefy, and almost never stretches it's legs because I'm always at work or busy with life stuff.
 
I bought an HIS 5830 one a couple weeks ago for £60, guessing OCUK just found one lying and sold it off for cheaps? I ain't complaining. :)

Bumped the clocks up to 850/1100, haven't really had time to go any further or bench it properly. Loving the card so far though, a gigantic step up from my X1900XT to say the least. :D

Might get another one once I've replaced my current cheap-o board with a 990FX board.
 
After thinking about it, I wouldn't go for a multi-GPU setup again. It would have been cheaper for me to upgrade to a GTX480, and although it would have less peak performance, the overall would be better I reckon. (When you factor in poor results, bogging down and microstutter).
 
The reason I asked is I'm thinking of going crossfire with the 6850, but seen so many people go back to a single card. Crossfire looks to have "hickups" which can spoil the awesome performance and poorer drivers. After all, you only need your game to run 40-60FPS, not 120+! Crossfire does seem essential for multi monitor and really high res gaming however.

Another reason to crossfire might be tesselation performance when games start using it more - I think a crossfire setup has twice the tesselation power of a single card? Single cards are quite slow at DX11 plus tesselation.

Thanks for your input Muel. :) I might sell and bag a 5870, they are going so cheap!
 
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Personally if I were you I'd get shot of the 6850 and get a GTX480/570/580. I thought the 6850 was more powerful than a 5870?

As far as tesselation goes, I though the GTX series were leagues ahead of ATI anyway?
 
Their performance lead dwindles as you go down the chip series since ATI uses a fixed unit for all cores and Nvidia scales theirs with their cores.
 
As mentioned above, the tesselation difference is less as cores are reduced on nVidia cards but also it depends on how the game is optimized. ATI's tesselation is powerful enough for all current games I think, and depends more on programmers optimizing the routine. In crossfire I'm assuming the double tesselation units will pretty much handle everything at twice the speed, like your 5830's Muel, but could be wrong.

6850 is slower than a 5850. but does have a few little nice extras like slightly better tesselation and a filtering fix.

A 5870 is much faster. Both are 40nm, and very few games are showing real must have DX11 and tesselation features that won't run on a 5870. Plus I enjoy trading cards as I get bored easily - I got this 6850 for about £100, so I could see it go for at least the same and pay a little for a 5870 second hand.

Something about owning a top end card that was close to £300 at one point seems appealing!
 
Buying a 5830 now is a stupid idea IMO. By modern standards they're big (physically), hot, thirsty, slow cards. I'm only still with mine because I have them and they do the job.

You can get a 5850 for £100 if you look around (brand new). Personally I'd go for a GTX570 though.

As for them running BF3, mine run BF2 at all full settings, 1920x1200, rarely drops below 60fps. (Not tried with a single card though).
 
I used to overclock my card with MSI Afterburner before i opened a game and then put it back to default after (is that fine or bad for the card?),
but i just read about putting PCI Frequency to 100 in BIOs, is this a must? because i had it set to auto before.
 
Muel said:
I don't think PCI frequency can change from 100 unless you up the FSB, but it should be set to 100 really, stops things dying.
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Ahh ok ty, also is there anyway to keep the card overclocked and still have it idle when not gaming? or is it safe to OC before i game and then reset after so it will idle?
 
Well they scale down to 2D clocks when you're not gaming, so if you overclock them you're only raising the 3D limits. I think that's right anyway, but don't quote me.

Basically the every day speed will be the same, but when you game the card automatically ramps up. Again, not completely certain about this. I have a feeling they may turn that feature off when overclocking. Try it and see what the clocks do in GPU-Z.
 
I can confirm it still powers down when you overclock a single card and use a single monitor, but if you run crossfire or two monitors the idle speeds may be higher. A quick google will clear it up.
 
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