Oh, I definitely see where the 5830 fits, it just doesn't look all that appealing to me at anything more than $200. Its been gimped way too much, 16 ROPs is a pretty tough pill to swallow, all that extra bandwidth over the 5770 looks like it'll mostly go to waste. Judging by its rumoured TDP (which is
higherthan the 5850) it looks like ATI will be able to sell some
really crappy dies now, so its a smart move I guess and it does fill the one major gap in ATI's DX11 lineup.
Its just a little disheartening to see that the price

erformance ratio has fell so much in the last few months and unless the 5830 is available at under $200 en masse (which it won't be, I guarantee you that) that isn't changing anytime soon either. I guess I should be happy, in a bizarre twist of events the value of my GPU has
risen since I bought it nearly a year ago but alas I'm not one to be sentimental about hardware, I want to see progress and we just don't seem to be getting it.
You know, I kinda predicted this happening, back before the 58xx launch there were countless people holding off for some "mythical" new price drop due to new hardware. I never saw it coming and despite pointing out just how much GPUs had dropped in the preceding 12-18 months, most seemed convinced it would continue while I kinda knew it couldn't.
With memory prices way up on last year as well, PC gaming "on a budget" is definitely more difficult now than it was 6-12 months ago, however bizarre that may seem. AMD's excellent $100 quad cores are a nice recent development though, I must admit.
Them Athlon ii X4s are perfect budget chips and enough to satisfy all but the most demanding of consumers.