| Sapphire Radeon HD 4830 |
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| Written by Jeff_Tom | ||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
| Tuesday, 04 November 2008 18:18 | ||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
Just last week ATI launched their newest card in the 4800 series of cards, the Radeon HD 4830. Since ATI improved their game incredibly with launching cards when they're ready in stores this has also cut down the time on non-reference cards hitting the market. These cards are out there now and today we have one to look at from Sapphire in their new Radeon HD 4830 card.
This Sapphire Radeon HD 4830 is very similar to some of their 4850 cards and other 4000 series cards as it features a blue PCB with their custom and large heatsink. This heatsink is visually very appealing but also drops the temperatures on a standard 4830 card dramatically. We've been saying since the launch of the 4800 series of cards the one major problem with all of them is that the heat is just far too high. This card ran at around 38 degrees Celsius for us and that's here in Texas! Easily the coolest running 4800 cards we've seen so far. When the card was maxed we topped out at 53 degrees Celsius. The card was very touchable unlike the other reference ATI 4800 cards. Our stock 4830 for reference at idle was already at 52 degrees Celsius and reached around 90 degrees Celsius. Of course this card is a dual slot card as the larger heatsink and fan extends out from the card but we think that tradeoff is more than worth it for the comfort of knowing your video card isn't getting too hot. I've personally had too many crashes in Crysis: Warhead from stock ATI 4000 series cards for my liking.
Not much else is different from other 4830 cards but not much else has to be. Sapphire's standard bundle is included here, DVI-to-VGA adapter, component cables, PCI-Express to Molex adapter, DVI-to-HDMI adapter, case sticker, and installation CD. The main feature set from the 4000 series of cards is here, second-gen 55nm manufacturing process, DX 10.1 support, CrossfireX technology, PowerPlay for energy savings, UVD2 for H.264 decoding, 7.1 audio output over HDMI. The major difference between the 4850 and 4830 is that the number of stream processors sees a drop from 800 to 640 and the clockspeed is lowered. That's about all so we shouldn't see a major shift in performance either which is quite good sine 4830 cards should be from $100-130.
Here are the specs on the various Radeon 4800 cards.
Here are the full technical specs.
Our test system OS was Windows Vista Ultimate 32-bit SP1 with ATI Catalyst 8.10 beta drivers and Forceware 178.24. DX10 and the highest settings were used at all times.
We'll start off with Call of Duty 4. Clearly two Radeon 4870 cards lead the way but at 2560x1600 things start to even up with two 4830 cards in Crossfire. The 4830 is about 10% slower than a 4850 which is where expect it to be and about on part with an overclocked GeForce 9800 GT.
In Crysis we see a similar pattern but the Crossfire cards are obviously CPU bound even at a "Very High" graphics setting. Unfortunately Crysis doesn't support 4 cores well and the Phenom at 2.6GHz is unable to push the cards and the game enough with only two core suport.
Unreal Tournament 3 is today's most popular engine so we have to test it. Here we see things closer all around but again about a 10% difference between the 4850 and the 4830 and the 9800 GT OC this time is just below it.
In Company of Heroes at 2560x1600 resolution with everything maxed out we definitely appear to be running out of memory bandwidth and texture memory in general as we see a sharp drop from all cards but the GDDR5 powered 4870. Don't let the 4830CF card fool you, that's within range of error, all results were fairly similar and it might have caused more lag in Crossfire with possible less memory bandwidth with the cards communicating with each other.
In World in Conflict we see a pattern basically similar to other games and realize how close the 4850 and 4830 are in performance.
Power consumption was measured from the wall socket directly from the computer. Idle was taken after 5 minutes into the Windows desktop and Load was tested emphasizing gaming performance and the video card in Crysis' GPU demo.
Two cards doesn't add a lot of power when everything is idle but when things are maxed out we're looking at almost another 100W draw. Still not too bad, 300W peak power draw with two 4830CF cards in a Phenom 9950. Overclocking the board was a snap with the great cooling it offered hitting
720MHz for
the core and 1.12GHz for the memory with ease.
Conclusion: We've already looking at the 4830 once and it definitely is a great card which is about 10% upper or lower performance from a Radeon HD 4850. If you're gaming at 1680x1050 or below then this is the perfect high-end card for you. 1920x1200 also seems very acceptable but we might go ahead and go for the 4850 or 4870 card over the 4830 as you'll want more memory bandwidth at a higher resolution and that's only going to increase in the future. Still, it is something anyone looking for good performance should consider. It also seems to top a standard 9800 GT and come in around the same as an overclocked card. Of course with a much better feature set though it isn't much of a contest. Overall, we're very happy Sapphire can provide a great card that rids the 4830's one problem which all 4800 cards have: heat, and do so at a great price. An OEM copy of a game would have been nice but it's not a major loss. Pricing: Sapphire's Radeon HD 4830 is available for an excellent $129 from MWave, which is basically the price of reference 4830 cards. For that price this is a fantastic deal and a no-brainer if you're looking for a 4830 card. Resolving the heat issue of the 4800 series removes the one flaw in the cards and is a great and practical movie on Sapphire's part. Sapphire's similar 4850 Radeon card is $172 though we've seen them closer in price at some other stores.
Score: 98%
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