After taking a look at our last Sapphire video card and being totally impressed, we were more than willing to take a look at their latest offering in the Radeon HD 4800 series family. Now the Radeon HD 4830 is basically a cut down version of Sapphire's Radeon HD 4850, and by doing so Sapphire is able to offer it at a much lower price point while still able to offer pretty close to the same overall performance, or so that's what Sapphire is saying anyways. We will find out just how well the card does soon enough. So, enough of the formalities. Let's get on to looking at this graphics card and see just how well it will stand up to the NVIDIA competition, especially the newer GeForce 9800 GT series. - Bjorn3D

Sapphire Radeon HD 4830 Custom Cool Style Review

It'll also be interesting to see just how well this little card overclocks, considering we were able to max out ATI's Overdrive utility with Sapphire's Radeon HD 4870 Toxic. The newer Sapphire Radeon HD 4830 shares the award winning graphics architecture used in the existing Radeon HD 4800 series and offers the same features, but with an optimised specification and lower price point to deliver the best performance in its price category. With only 640 shader engines and clock speeds of 575MHz core and 1800MHz memory, it just offers quite similar overall performance to the Radeon HD 4850 model but at a reduced price point.

Like other Sapphire products, the Radeon HD 4830 is shipped in a heavy brown cardboard box that's sleeved in a colorful retail outer box. As with all retail video card products we've seen, the packaging is full of marketing graphics as well as a full list of features, specifications and minimum system requirements, all of which the end user should be very familiar with before purchasing a new video card or any computer part, for that matter. The bundle that's supplied with the Radeon HD 4830 is what we would call the bare minimum. It has everything that you need to install the card and get it up and running with any type of display.

The only complaint we have with the bundle is that Sapphire did not include a CrossFire bridge in the box, which in our opinion should be supplied with every CrossFire capable board. You'll notice the PCB is Sapphire's own make, using their typical blue coloring as well as a different PCB layout than reference ATI Radeon HD 4830 cards. Sapphire also opted to use a huge dual slot cooler on their card which should keep the card plenty cool while also keeping the noise levels as low as possible. As we mentioned before, the Sapphire PCB differs from the reference layout to some degree, mainly to bring the costs down.

If you look at the front of the card in front of the GPU cooler, you'll see that the voltage regulator module cooling is taken care of by a separate heatsink pinned to the PCB. On reference boards the voltage circuitry are located at the rear of the PCB next to the PCI Express power connector. Another thing to note about this cooling setup is that there aren't any heatsinks on the video memory chips and not only isn't there any cooling for the memory besides air, there isn't any room to install any type of heatsinks even if you wanted to. Overall, we are completely pleased with the performance of the Sapphire graphics card.

It beats the GeForce 8800 GT in the majority of the test runs and in our opinion the image quality is slightly better. There are a few shortfalls that we noted throughout the article, but some are a give and take sort of issue to keep the cost low and competitive. Not including a full version of a current game isn't what we would call a deal breaker and the lack of a CrossFire bridge isn't either, although it would be nice to have one included so you could just run a budget CrossFire setup if you are in the mind to without going through all the hassle of ordering a CrossFire bridge separately and wait for delivery.

About the only thing that we're really not that big on is the lack of cooling on the video memory. This impacts the cards overclocking potential on the memory a lot in our opinion. When looking around at other vendor's Radeon HD 4830's, there are a few that have their video memory clocked at default speeds higher than we could get this card to go, but they had coolers that cooled both the GPU and video memory. This tells us that the memory needs better video memory cooling. Now on to the final verdict, we're impressed with the performance of the card mainly for what you have to pay for one and that is surely a strong point.

Currently, they are about the same price as the NVIDIA based GeForce 9800 GT out there depending on where you shop and who has what for a mail-in rebate going this week. So, if you're on short purse strings, but need a new video card to play some of today's current games at reasonable settings, you should be giving the Sapphire Radeon HD 4830 a look. It'll be worth your time. We would be interested in trying out a set in a budget CrossFire setup just to see what kind of performance $200 will get you these days. It would be interesting to see if the Radeon HD 4830's would beat out a Radeon HD 4870.