AIBs have their hands free
The upcoming HD 5830, expected to be officially announced tomorrow, will be ship without the reference design, or to be precise, there will be no AMD reference design PCB. AMD has shipped GPUs to its partners and it is up to them to use their own designs, PCBs and coolers, so you can expect a wide variety of cards immediately after launch.
We are pretty sure that AMD gave some guidelines and maybe even some restrictions for the partners, but at least they can use their own coolers this time. We suspect that Sapphire will come up with Vapor-X card, and picture of Powercolor PCS card suggest that most manufacturers will go for the same cooler which we saw back on the non-reference HD 5850 cards. We know that at least one manufacturer will use the cooler similar to the one on the HD 5770 card which is also a possibility, but we guess that we'll see more once AMD's HD 5830 NDA gets lifted tomorrow.
The first HD 5830 card that was pixellized came from Gigabyte and this one uses a special 2oz copper PCB, Japanese solid capacitors, tier 1 memory and bunch of other neat features that are a part of Gigabyte's Ultra Durable tech. Gigabyte also went for a dual fan cooler which should drastically lower the temps.
Considering the performance numbers and price rumours, the HD 5830 might have a bright future.
