Sapphire's Radeon HD 5830
Spinning at around 45 per cent of maximum when set to the default 'auto' mode, the large fan keeps the GPU to below 70°C when under full load. Its noise profile is lower than a reference HD 5850 card's at all load levels.
One can manually adjust the fan's speed by using a third-party utility, and we found the combination of (a maximum) 30 per cent fan-speed and 75°C load to be optimum - producing near-silent running under the harshest of gaming conditions.
It keeps to the AMD-recommended frequencies of 800MHz core and 4,000MHz memory, but we know that it will scale much higher, especially as the card is outfitted with eight 1Gbit GDDR5 memory modules - K4G10325FE-HC04 - provided by Samsung and rated to an effective 5,000MHz.
Attaching five heatpipes to the copper insert instead of three on the HD 5850 TOXIC, it paves the way for some headroom in the overclocking department.
The change in shroud design means that the fan spits out hot air more from the side than exhausting it out of the back, and it something we'd like to see changed on future HD 5830 models. But one aspect we don't like is the lack of direct memory cooling on the chips; they're left bare.
Summary
Sapphire's taken the Radeon HD 5850 TOXIC as a blueprint, changed the cooler and the underlying GPU. The package should etail for around £190, but does include a tasty extra...
