With ATI continuing to dominate the top end graphics cards market, they are releasing boards left, right and centre, to get even a firmer grasp on the top end of the industry. And indeed since their Radeon HD 3800 series the tables turned a bit in favor of ATI when it comes to the price to performance ratio. Now that is even more so with their Radeon HD 4800 series which offer even a better ratio, and can take on the competition easily. On that aspect AMD has swiftly moved their strategy and been able to regain again their part of the market share they had lost before. Now today we're looking at their Radeon HD 4830 card, which promises some top performance with a reasonable price tag. - XSReviews

Sapphire Radeon HD 4830 512MB Video Style Review

The box is quite compact for a new top end GPU. It has a scantily clad, sword wielding maiden on the front, with a couple of ATI badges and a large 512MB sticker. The back has a small prose section with lots of feature buttons along the right hand side. Next to the little sword toting chick at the bottom is a long list of review awards that Sapphire cards have been given over the years. The card itself looks pretty good. It is a nice change from the large blocky top end video cards with their whopping cooling shrouds. It's quite compact, just like it's box, with a chunky petal cooler over the GPU chip though naked memory chips.

The cooler is made up of an aluminium petal heatsink, with a translucent white fan atop it, incased in a not too restrictive shroud. This heatsink sits just above the front mounted memory chips allowing for the air to be blown through the heatsink, and straight across them. And this helps cool the memory on the card, allowing for better stability and improved overclocking. Speaking of the memory chips, they're Qimonda which aren't exactly the best chips out there, but at least it's a name we recognise. The pulse width modulation area on the card also has dedicated cooling, it being covered with an aluminium heatsink of its own.

In regards to powering the fan, it's a mini on-board 2-pin connector, so no need to worry about finding a spare spot on your motherboard. There are a few solid capacitors on the PCB, but there are also plenty of lesser quality ones, with some non ferrite chokes dotted about. This lends itself to the mid-range image of the card, as it's clear money was spared on certain components. Don't expect as long life from these as you would from those on cards costing +$500. The main power for the card of course comes through the PCI Express 2.0 slot, however an extra 6-pin power connector is also necessary to give that bit extra.

Using the most simple method of overclocking you can possibly have, we popped open the Catalyst centre and after unlocking the overclock options, we hit auto tune and got back to writing. Coming back ten minutes later, it did managed to take the Sapphire Radeon HD 4830 from 575MHz on the core, and 1800MHz on the memory, to 690/2270MHz respectively which is a pretty impressive result. It isn't groundbreaking but it sure is a nice percentage boost to their frequencies. Now unfortunately though during testing these settings did artifact somewhat, so further tweaking is definately required to get it really stable as such.

The Radeon HD 4830 from Sapphire is a damn nice card for the money. It might not be the quietest one out there, but it's only slightly behind the Radeon HD 4850 on the performance scale, and with it's great overclocking ability, and don't forget you can always add a second, therefore running two of these bad boys, for a less than the price of a GeForce GTX 280. So if you're looking for a new card of around $130, then get the Radeon HD 4830, or if you have $150, get the Radeon HD 4850. There aint a lot of difference.