We came home today to find a nice Fed-Ex box sitting by our chair. We opened it up to find Sapphire's latest addition to the graphics rendering world, with the Sapphire Radeon HD 4830. Their Radeon HD 4830, which fills the gap between the Radeon HD 4670 and the Radeon HD 4850, is the entry level Radeon HD 4800 series graphics card and is aimed towards the budget gaming market. This should really give ATI and extra boost in sales especially with the holiday season nearby and swing in some extra money. We will be taking a closer look at the Sapphire Radeon HD 4830 and see how it does in hours of gaming combat. Can it run with the big dogs? Or does it need to stay on the porch? - Modders-Inc

Sapphire Radeon HD 4830 Standard Graphics Review

The Sapphire Radeon HD 4830 comes packaged in a stunning Sapphire blue and black box, with the ever present and alluring femme fatale just asking us poor weak gamers to sucumb to her enchantment and buy the box. We mean card! Oh yeah the front looks great as always, sporting the Sapphire logo, card name and two ATI badges. The back of course lists many features and details, along with yet another picture of our femme fetale. And we must say, not that it means anything, that this box was smaller than we expected. It had us thinking of a box of cracker jacks, with eye candy to boot if you get what we mean!

The new Sapphire Radeon HD 4830 card shares the award winning graphics architecture used in the existing Radeon HD 4800 series and offers the same features, but with an optimized specification and lower price point to deliver the best performance in its price category. Now with 640 shader engines and clock speeds of 575MHz core and 1800MHz memory, it should offer similar overall performance to the Radeon HD 4850 model but at a reduced price point. The ATI Radeon HD 4830 series GPU's deliver a great cinematic gaming experience with unprecedented performance, and very good looking visual sceneries.

These powerful new TeraScale graphics will propel you deep into your game play with seamless frame rates and high resolutions. The enhanced anti-aliasing and anisotropic filtering create striking graphics with unparalleled realism so you can max out the settings of the most demanding next-generation games or revitalize your favorite titles. As such inside the Sapphire Radeon HD 4830's alluring outer packaging we find the inner box containing the Radeon HD 4830 board and accessories. The Sapphire Radeon HD 4830 is wrapped in a thick bubble wrap type static free bag to help keep it from any damage during shipment.

Sapphire used it's on heatsink on the Radeon HD 4830 card instead of the AMD referenced heatsink. Though the card will use only one expansion slot, the cooler is a dual slot type cooler. We can see that if it were covered all the way to the expansion slot area it would indeed take two expansion slots. Now that's a serious cooler for a single slot card. On the back side of the card you can see the four screws needed to hold the rather large heatsink on. You know, for some odd reason this heatsink reminds me a lot of an intel heatsink. You also find the CrossFireX connector at the top, though Sapphire did not include a bridge.

Now we are not big into overclocking, but the Sapphire Radeon HD 4830 was crying out to be overclocked with those meager idle temps and that big cooler. In small increments we were able to slowly build the card up to an overclock of 700MHz GPU and 2050MHz memory. After all the testing we could not wait to put it to the real test, a few hours of online gaming. We have to say that the card performed above my expectations. We played Call of Duty 4 for roughly three hours straight and the card maintained a good frame rate throughout on each map with the game play being pretty smooth and rather enjoyable.

As such we feel that the benchmark testing was pretty much on the money considering the game play we were getting. Having played with the GeForce 8800 GTS in the past and knowing just how strong it was in Call of Duty 4 we were pretty impressed with the Sapphire Radeon HD 4830's performance. For the price it just can't be beat, heck buy two and run them in CrossFireX for a killer gaming setup for a fraction of the high-end cards. We can only imagine what two Sapphire Radeon HD 4830's in CrossFireX would do. The bottom line is quite simple, the Sapphire Radeon HD 4830 rocks!