So with the holidays upon us, many gamers choose this time of the year for their annual or semi annual PC upgrade. This time last year the upgrade everyone wanted was NVIDIA's GeForce 8800 GT board. Packing 112 shaders clocked at 1500MHz, a 600MHz core clock and a 256-bit memory interface with 1800MHz memory, it delivered an extraordinary amount of performance for its $300 price tag. As a result of the overwhelming demand for the GeForce 8800 GT, NVIDIA ramped up production quite significantly. Their company assumed demand would remain strong throughout the entire summer. However NVIDIA underestimated the strength of ATI's then upcoming Radeon HD 4800 product line. - FiringSquad

MSI Radeon HD 4830 512MB OverClock Board Review

It was a game changing move that forced NVIDIA to slash prices on their entire GeForce lineup. The GeForce 9800 GTX saw its price reduced to $199 while their GeForce 8800 GT card was reduced to $169. Ultimately ATI's move crippled a bit more the GeForce 8800 GT sales as enthusiasts gladly ponied up the extra couple of dollars for a Radeon HD 4850, forcing NVIDIA to reduce prices yet again. This eventually lead to a situation where NVIDIA had supplies of all these GeForce 8800 GT parts that they had a hard time moving, forcing them to trim prices yet again. Today GeForce 9800 GT boards can be found for about $120.

And with manufacturers offering mail-in rebates that bring the final price down to as low as $95! This is simply an amazing value for gamers on a budget as the GeForce 8800 GT is still more than capable of handling most of today's latest games. Rather than develop a new GPU from scratch, as we just mentioned the RV770 powering the Radeon HD 4830 is physically the exact same RV770 chip found in the Radeon HD 4850, only ATI lowers the clock speeds and disabling 160 stream processing cores, leaving 640 active shaders. The final product is then sold as the Radeon HD 4830 graphics accelerator.

While MSI could have taken the easy and cheaper route and played it safe by sticking with ATI's Radeon HD 4830 reference board design, which is actually a carbon copy of the Radeon HD 4850 design, they didn't. In fact they've come up with the most robust Radeon HD 4830 board design that's been released to date. MSI starts with the board's power subsystem. Whereas the reference board design utilize 2-phase power, MSI ups the ante by integrating a 4-phase power design for their Radeon HD 4830 OverClock edition. With double the number of power phases, the GPU gets a cleaner and more stable power signal.

MSI's really outdone themselves with the Radeon HD 4830 OverClock edition. From a pure hardware perspective, this board is pretty much perfect. MSI's board implementation and choice of components is first rate. On the memory side, MSI spices up the package by using 2GHz memory modules sourced from Samsung. Since the memory runs at just 1800MHz, this gives you an instant 200MHz worth of headroom for overclocking. And we managed to hit some very high clock speeds with our sample, being around 731/2250MHz thanks in large part to the enhancements MSI has added to the board and cooling solution.

Despite our disappointment with the Radeon HD 4830 OverClock stock clocks, and more importantly the lack of a CrossFire cable, we're going to go ahead and award the card. While it may not be clocked as high as we'd like, MSI has clearly delivered a wolf in sheep's clothing. Once overclocked, this card becomes the Ferrari of the Radeon HD 4830 cards. If you want the best Radeon HD 4830 money can buy right now, look no further than MSI's Radeon HD 4830 OverClock version as it will just be what you need.