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Sapphire Radeon HD 4830 512MB
Introduction
The state of graphics hardware is often predictable. A new generation of chipset is made, it's faster, it subsequently is improved, and more variation comes out of it. Older hardware is pushed aside, sometimes unnecessarily, but gains appeal through price drops. Saying that the last year or so of developments hasn't been entertaining is wrong, but it's not taking a new turn. It's just happening ridiculously fast. This year's video card harvest was massive. Lots of new cards, lots of old cards with a fresh sticker, but most impressively, the bang-for-buck has basically tripled. It's that everything's a great deal--although the HD 4830 may be a little greater than the rest. The '30 is, deceptively, a broken card. It's got the same 4800 core we've come to all love, maybe a little too much, but with some flaw preventing all 800 stream processors to work. Cooler heads prevailing, ATI designed the chip to allow for some chunk of the core to be disabled, leaving the remaining 640 kicking hard. This strategy is paying off. You make one chip and get, like, seven video cards from it: the slower glass goes into 4850s, a competitive if standard part, the faster glass gets extra bandwidth and fast memory, and becomes a 4870, with both of these also in X2 and 1GB configurations. The broken ones? You'd be hard-pressed to tell that there was a damn thing wrong in the first place, 'cause these cards are solid.    The Card & Bundle I don't think there's a "stock" 4830. Sapphire usually runs that route with the non-Toxic or their other variants, but I'm pretty sure that it's up to the board partner to build a better 4830; they're all different. Each has its own heatsink and board layout. Sapphire's is, at least, true to the namesake, and mega-blue. Sapphire's looks backwards to me, with the power regulation hardware under a heatsink at the back of the card opposite the auxiliary power connector. It's a simple little aluminum bit, more or less a beefy heatspreader. The GPU has another simple aluminum heatsink, radial and not unlike a stock Intel CPU heatsink, except that it has that black plastic winged (read that as "wing-ed", FYI) bevel, that I think looks like a Chinese horsehair cap, but whatever, it does the job, you'll see, impressively. The GPU heatsink is dual-slot, which probably keeps costs down; you can obviously get away with a smaller cooler, but then it'd be made of copper, and I think most people would rather have the card and save some scratch. All the 4830s that I've seen have similar dual-slot aluminum cooling, so I think that the low-cost approach is persuasive. Yeah, it's got a bundle, video-out adapters, an HDMI adapter, an install CD, and all in a nicely compact package. I like a massive box full of foam as much as the next guy, but hey, we're supposed to be green and junk. It's like having a little hybrid inside your computer, so at least you've got something to brag about.  
Page 1: Introduction, The Card & Bundle
Page 2: Specifications and Setup Page 3: DirectX 10 Titles Page 4: DX9, OpenGL, and Synthetics Page 5: Video, Power, and Overclocking Page 6: Conclusion 
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1 User Comment 1 - Posted by
MiguelLane
on December 15, 2009 - 2:26 am Add Comment To add a comment without being a member, you may omit the password field, but you must enter your name (or nickname) along with your comment. * Denotes required fields. |
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