The Card

Looking at the cards, the design isn't anything out of the ordinary with both coolers being ones we've seen before. As for the sizes of the cards, you can see that the higher end model; the HD 5850 is a fair bit smaller. This is probably the main reason Sapphire are able to opt for a smaller box over the bigger HD 5830.

When it comes to power, both cards are identical with a dual 6-Pin PCI-E setup. The only difference is the location with the larger HD 5830 seeing them on the top of the card while the HD 5850 sees them at the back and slightly separated.

Connectivity between both cards is almost identical with Dual-Link DVI, HDMI and DisplayPort. The only difference is that the HD 5830 uses a mini DisplayPort connector while the HD 5850 uses a full size one.

Specifications

On the specification front the cards both carry with them the same clock speeds we saw when the models launched. That means the HD 5830 comes in with a core clock of 800MHz while the 1GB of GDDR5 comes in at 4000MHz QDR.

As for the HD 5850, the 1GB of GDDR5 carries the same clock speed as the HD 5830 coming in at 4000MHz QDR, but carries a lower clock than the HD 5830 at 725MHz. Of course, the big advantage the HD 5850 has over the HD 5830 is that it carries more Stream Processors with 1440 versus the HD 5830 which carries only 1120.