The ATI Mobility Radeon HD 5830 is a performance class DirectX 11 capable graphics card for laptops / notebooks by AMD. Technically the HD5830 is a slower clocked HD 5850 without the support for fast GDDR5 graphics memory. Therefore, the 128 bit memory bus in conjunction with DDR3 memory may be a performance bottleneck. As all cards of the Mobility HD 5800 series, the HD 5830 is based on the desktop HD 5770 (RV840) chip. 

The memory interface of the Mobility 5830 is composed out of two 64 bit wide controllers leading to a 128 bit memory bus that can access up to 1024 MB of DDR3. Because of the small bus width and the lack of GDDR5 memory, the memory performance should be the bottleneck of this card.

The 5830 offers 800 MADD cores (called Stream Processors) which are grouped in 160 5-dimensional groups. The cores support DirectX 11 functions in hardware (Tessellation, OIT, Post-Processing, Shadows, HDR Texture Compression). Furthermore, 16 ROPs, 40TMUs, and 40 TAUs can be found on the chip. 

According to AMD, the HD 5000 series was also improved regarding general computing (as the HD4000 series was not optimized for this). Therefore, the performance of ATI stream, OpenCL, and DirectCompute 11 applications should be noticable better.

The 3D performance of the Mobility HD 5830 should be in the performance class and therefore capable of generating fluent framerates in all current games (2009). High end games like Crysis wont run in very high details, but most games should run with playable framerates.

The Mobility Radeon HD 5000 series includes an improved video processor (UVD2) to decode HD videos with the graphic card. The new version is able to decode two HD streams simultaneously (e.g., for Blu-Ray picture in picture) if the graphic card offers enough memory bandwidth (only GDDR5 versions - and therefore perhaps not in the HD5830?). Since the Flash 10.1 Beta, the 5000 series is also able to help accelerate Flash HD videos (like YouTube).

A special feature of the HD 5000 series is its ability to transmit HD audio formats (like Dolby True HD or DTS HD Master Audio) with up to 8 channels and 192 KHz / 24 Bit over HDMI 1.3a.

As the desktop HD 5000 series, the Mobility HD 5830 also supports Eyefinity to connect up to 6 monitors to the graphics chip. Of course, this depends on how many monitor outputs the laptop vendor adds to the laptop (and how they are wired). Most laptops will support three screens simultaneously (internal and two external).

The power consumption of 24 Watt (according to AMD) is not that high. Therefore, this GPU could also be used in 15-16" laptops.

For more games that might be playable and a list of all games and graphics cards visit our Gaming List