With the massive list of current video cards available to the consumer, it is hard to make a clear decision on which card to pick. No matter your price range there are many to choose from. Arguably the most popular price range would be in the range of $100 to $200. At this price point you have cards like the ATI Radeon HD 4850 and the NVIDIA GeForce 9800 GTX, and coming close is the GeForce GTX 260. Each of these cards is great, and will provide you with many hours of high frame rate gaming. But what if your wallet will only allow you to buy at the lower spectrum of this range? Well, the next card on the bench may be just what you are looking for, with a great price to performance aspect. - Pro-Clockers

Sapphire Radeon HD 4830 Redefined Cooling Review

The ATI powered Radeon HD 4830 from Sapphire is showing promise at being one of the best bangs for the buck cards out there. The Radeon HD 4830 has the same amount of memory as the Radeon HD 4850, but is clocked slightly lower and lacks a few of the shader units of the bigger sibling. Granted the Radeon HD 4830 isn't here to steal any of the Radeon HD 4850's thunder, but it is targeted at the NVIDIA GeForce 8800 GT and GeForce 9800 GT series. Their new Sapphire Radeon HD 4830 shares the award winning graphics architecture used in the existing Radeon HD 4800 series and offers the same features.

Though it comes with more optimised specs and lower price point to deliver the best performance in its own price category. With 640 shader engines and clock speeds of 575MHz and 1800MHz memory, it offers similar overall performance to the Radeon HD 4850 model but at a reduced price point. The first and one of the best things about the new Radeon HD 4830 is that it breaks away from the traditional offerings of the ATI reference boards. Sapphire decided that it was time to design a new cooling system for the card. To cool the RV770 and some of the memory modules Sapphire went out and used an aftermarket cooler.

We used ATI's control center to handle the overclocking of the Radeon HD 4830. With that performing the overclocking, we were able to obtain an overclock of 690MHz on the core and 2320MHz on the memory. And both clocks were pretty impressive. Is the Radeon HD4 830 the video card to end all video cards? No, but it is one of the best bang for the buck cards out there. The card retails at about $119 at most major online stores, and the performance numbers put it right under the Radeon HD 4850, which is where it is supposed to be. This alone will make sure that the Radeon HD 4830 is a hit for Sapphire and AMD all together.

This is the proof that you can have very good performance at a price that will not break the bank. If the wallet allows it you can have performance numbers that rival the Radeon HD 4870 and the GeForce GTX 260, and still have money left over to buy a decent cooler to tame your CPU. Are we over hyping the Radeon HD 4830? Not at all, this is a great card for the money, the numbers prove it. For those that make noise and looks a factor in buying a video card, they will be happy to hear that the Radeon HD 4830 from Sapphire is very quiet compared to the likes of the high-end ATI cards and even the NVIDIA ones for that matter.