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Published: November 18, 2008 | Source: Sapphire | Author: James Napier

Sapphire Radeon HD 4830 – Budget Overclocking

Packaging & Appearance
 
Presented in a slimline cardboard box with dimensions not dissimilar to the graphics card contained within, it’s clear to see that Sapphire have made a concious effort to keep any additional costs to a minimum. The overall colour scheme of the packaging is a combination of black and blue with an almost ‘Vista-like’ Aura style background. Ruby also makes an appearance at the front of box, getting out her best assets for the lads (her swords of course!).
 
 Sapphire HD4830 Box Front Sapphire HD4830 Box Back
 
Sapphire HD4830 Box Open Sapphire HD4830 Contents
 

Inside the box you’ll find the usual collection of accessories including a DVI-VGA converter, DVI-HDMI converter, Molex-PCIe cable, S-Video cable and a driver disk. The card itsself is packaged inside a bubble-wrap padded anti-static bag, which will more than likely only offer minimal protection from courier inflicted damage. This basic level of packaging is something we’ve mentioned previously in our HD 4870 review, but given that this is a budget card it would seem that Sapphire are willing to take their chances.

 
Sapphire HD4830 Top Sapphire HD4830 Cooler
 
Sapphire HD4830 Front Sapphire HD4830 Rear
 
The card itsself is of a non-reference design with the most visible difference being the Sapphire blue PCB. Sapphire have also replaced the AMD stock cooler with an aluminium fin design that closely resembles an Intel CPU cooler. During our testing the cooler kept the card at around 38c idle / 56c load with an ambient temperature of 23c. Noise levels were also very acceptable with the card being inaudible over the system and CPU fans.
 
Sapphire HD 4830 Qimonda memory Sapphire HD 4830 PWM
 

A total of eight Qimonda GDDR3 memory IC’s span the top and rear of the card with each chip carrying the model number HYB18H512321BF-10. Based on our previous experience with Qimonda GDDR3 these should overclock reasonably well, but obviously we’ll find out for sure over on the next page.

 
Interestingly Sapphire have moved the power delivery (PWM) chips to the other side of the card compared with the reference AMD design. This could possibly be to obtain the benefit of additional airflow from the cooler, but will certainly prevent the card from being used with any other aftermarket coolers (such as full-cover water blocks).