Sapphire HD 4830 - ATI Graphics Card Review

This is part 1 of a 2 part review of Sapphire's recent addtion to the HD 4000 series graphics cards, brings us the HD 4830. It is a mainstream card that by looking at the specs alone suggest great performance possibilities for the exceptional price point compared to other higher end cards.

The HD 4830 uses the same architecture of Radeon HD 4850 and Radeon HD 4870, but with 640 graphics processors instead of 800 and up from other models. Clocks are also different with the HD 4830 running at 575Mhz which is a little less than the HD 4850 but more than the GeForce nVidia 9800 GT.

Watch part 1 of 2 of the review

SAPPHIRE HD 4830 Graphics Card Key Features

· Support for DirectX® 10.1 and Open GL 2.0

· 640 stream processing units

· 256-bit memory interface

· 512 GDDR3 memory @ 900Mhz (which effectivly runs double at 1.8Ghz)

· 24x custom filter anti-aliasing (CFAA) and high performance anisotropic filtering

· ATI CrossFireX™ multi-GPU support for highly scalable performance

· Dynamic geometry acceleration

· Game physics processing capability

· ATI Avivo™ HD video and display technology

· Unified Video Decoder 2 (UVD 2) for Blu-ray™ and HD Video

· Accelerated Video Transcoding (AVT)

· DVD Upscaling

· Dynamic Contrast

· Built-in HDMI with 7.1 surround sound support

· ATI PowerPlay™ technology optimises power consumption depending on usage

System Requirements:

• A PCI Express® based PC is required with one X16 lane graphics slot available on the motherboard

• A 450 Watt minimum power supply with 75 Watt 6-pin PCI Express® power connector

recommended (550 Watt and two 6-pin connectors for ATI CrossFireX™ technology in dual mode). Certified power supplies are recommended.

Refer to http://ati.amd.com/certifiedPSU for a list of Certified products

• 1GB of system memory

• Installation software requires CD-ROM drive

• DVD playback requires DVD drive

• Blu-ray™ playback requires Blu-ray drive

• For a complete ATI CrossFireX™ system, a second ATI Radeon™ HD 4830 graphics card, an ATI CrossFireX Ready motherboard and one ATI CrossFireX Bridge Interconnect cable per board are required

Sapphire's HD 4830 is basically a capped HD 4850, running at lower clock rates and having less graphics processors available but offers as much performance you can expect for the price making a great choice for your mainstream card. In the next video review we go in depth in installing and benchmarking the HD 4830 against the rest. So far the HD 4830 promises to give the most bang for the buck making it a great choice for those on a budget looking for performance.

In my next portion of this review we look more in depth at the rated specs and benchmark them as well to tweaking an overclocking the card to achieve maximum performance. Stay tuned to PART 2.

Latest pricing on the SAPPHIRE Radeon HD 4830 100265L Video Card


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