We have to admit that until the Radeon HD 4830 card arrived on our door step we really hadn't heard of it, a bit like what happened to NVIDIA a while back when everyone was more interested in seeing what ATI was doing with the new Radeon HD 4800 series. Now the tables have turned and everyone is paying more attention to the new NVIDIA cards due out rather than what ATI is doing at the moment. The Radeon HD 4830 is the latest card to enter the Radeon HD 4800 series line-up and is the lowest of the bunch. The thing is though, we really do wonder how much lower it is than the Radeon HD 4850, which is one of the best valued cards on the market to date and wonder what will remain. - TweakTown

MSI Radeon HD 4830 512MB OC Edition Card Review

It's been a while since we have seen anything from MSI, but not a whole lot has changed in their box design. Across the top of the box we have the MSI logo along with the ATI one on the other side, while down the bottom we have mention that this video card is an OC edition and that it's part of the gaming series. In the middle of the box we can see the model of the card mentioned and in this case, it's the Radeon HD 4830. Below that we can see some of the main features on the card which include 512MB of GDDR3 memory, HDMI and more. Turning the box over, we have more details on the features to the left of the box.

Pulling the card out of the box, we don't see anything that we haven't really seen before. Length wise we come in at the same size as the Radeon HD 4850 and we see the typical red PCB that we've become accustomed to. MSI has opted for a larger single fan directly on top of the core that manages to make the card a dual slot one. As far as the overall fan design goes, there isn't anything too fancy going on with no heatpipes present or even direct contact with the memory modules. Having a quick look around the card, we continue to see nothing out of the ordinary. Towards the back we have a single 6-pin PCI Express power inlet.

Where the cards begin to differ are the 640 shaders on the Radeon HD 4830 versus 800 on the Radeon HD 4850 along with the lower clock rates of 575MHz on the core and 1800MHz effective on the memory. As mentioned, this card from MSI is overclocked and has had a 10MHz bump on the core, bringing it to 585MHz. The Radeon HD 4830 actually performs better than we thought it would, it manages to perform at up to low widescreen resolution with anywhere from similar performance to around twenty percent slower. With a price difference of about fifteen percent, depending on the brand, it's going to be a hard decision.

Let's break it down, first ultimately the board is not going to be as fast as the Radeon HD 4850, but that was never expected. The other thing is depending on brand, it's not all that much more expensive to move to the Radeon HD 4850 which is faster. On the other side of things, there is the fact that the board manages to perform quite similar to the Radeon HD 4850 at resolutions of up to widescreen resolutions, meaning if you're playing at those resolutions or lower, the video card is a fairly good buy. Then there is of course the fact that the card manages to use less power, run cooler and make less noise.

And we have to admit that we were going into this article with a pretty negative attitude. We really thought it was going to be one of those cards that carries the name of its higher end brothers but put's out performance of something much lower. We were surprised to say the least and the Radeon HD 4830 is ultimately a pretty good card with decent gaming performance.