AMD has announced the launch of a middle of the range product known as the 5830, designed as yet another plug in their market wall, in an attempt to have as full a range as possible before the impending release of nVidia's Fermi hardware in the latter parts of March. It's essentially a cut down version of the 5870/50 cards and will fill the gap between the latter, and the previously released 5770.

It uses the same wafer as its bigger brothers known as Cypress, and comes with 1120 stream processors, with an 800MHZ core and a single GB of 1GHZ speed GDDR5 with a 256-bit bus. The texture units have seen a slight reduction from the older, chunkier cards, with only 56 being packed into it, running at a cutback 16 ROPs.

While the hardware is quite middle ground, the price tag will reflect that: running at around $240 in the US. Expect those numbers to stay roughly the same when it hits the UK shores, as we get everything a bit more expensive; I bet its at least £200. The dollar ammount is just about going to be worth it for US based customers, as the specs should see the 5830 sit just beneath the GTX 275, and around the GTX 260 performance bracket. However, it does need to be taken into consideration that it will perfom this well, while adding all of the latest ATI 5 series features, including the ever popular DirectX11. This will deliver in such titles as DIRT 2 and Aliens Vs Predator, full model tessellation, as well as enhanced depth of field and improved shading. A lower power consumption than past cards is also expected thanks to the die size reduction in Cypress wafer hardware, along with ATI's much touted Eyefinity technology which allows the user - through the use of a display port and dual DVI - to run three monitors from a single graphics card.