Sapphire Radeon HD 5830 Extreme

Sapphire's Radeon HD 5830 graphics card does not follow AMD's reference design as far as the cooler goes. Sapphire is shipping the HD 5830 Extreme with a heatpipe-based dual-slot cooler that is similar to the cooling solution they are using on their Radeon HD 6800 series graphics cards. The fan on this heatsink comprised of triple heatpipes and aluminum fins is very quiet and its speed is dynamically adjusted based upon load. The Radeon HD 5830 requires dual six-pin PCI Express power connectors for supplying enough power to this mid-range graphics card.

The Radeon HD 5830 is CrossFireX-compatible, but there are not too many Linux games/applications that can properly take advantage of this distributed multi-card rendering support. The 1GB of GDDR5 memory is comprised of Elpida W1032BABG-50-F ICs.

Mini DisplayPort, HDMI, and dual-link DVI are the three outputs on this graphics card. All three outputs can be utilized simultaneously with Eyefinity Technology as long as there is a DisplayPort monitor attached or an active adapter (as opposed to a passive adapter to a DVI display). The second expansion slot provides sufficient means of exhaust for Sapphire's heatsink.