Sapphire Radeon HD 4830 – Budget Overclocking
Test Setup
As mentioned earlier in the review, our main focus today is going to be on the performance and value of the Sapphire HD 4830 with an overclock applied. These results will be compared to both the stock HD 4830 results, a generic HD 4850 and an XFX 9500GT thrown in for good measure as a representation of a once similar priced card from the green team. To ensure that each of the graphics cards has plenty of room to ‘shine’, the following overclocked test system will be used to remove the chance of any bottlenecks outside of the GPU.
Processor
Intel Core 2 Quad Q6600 “G0” 2.4GHz @ 3.6GHz
Intel Core 2 Quad Q6600 “G0” 2.4GHz @ 3.6GHz
Motherboard
ASUS Rampage Formula X48 DDR2
Memory
OCZ Flex2 4GB (2x2GB) PC2-9200 5-5-5-15
PSU
Tuniq Ensemble 1200w
Display
ASUS MK241H 24″
Graphics Drivers
AMD Catalyst 8.10 / NVidia ????
The following list of games has also been chosen to test each of the cards on a number of popular game engines. Each game will be run at varying quality and AF settings at both low and high resolutions.
Quake Wars
1440×900 / High / 4xAA
1680×1050 / High / 4xAA
1920×1200 / High / 4xAA
1440×900 / High / 4xAA
1680×1050 / High / 4xAA
1920×1200 / High / 4xAA
Unreal Tournament III
1440×900 / DX10 / High
1680×1050 / DX10 / High
1920×1200 / DX10 / High
Call of Duty 4
1440×900 / Max / 4xAA / 4xAF
1680×1050 / Max / 4xAA / 4xAF
1920×1200 / Max / 4xAA / 4xAF
Crysis
1440×900 / DX10 / High / 0xAA / 0xAF
1680×1050 / DX10 / High / 4xAA / 4xAF
1920×1200 / DX10 / High / 4xAA / 4xAF
GRID
1440×900 / DX10 / High / 4xAA
1680×1050 / DX10 / High / 4xAA
1920×1200 / DX10 / High / 4xAA
During the benchmarking phase, we will be using the following prices extracted from ebuyer.com on 14/11/08 to produce our CPF (Cost Per Frame) graphs. Please remember that these graphs are static and only represent a snapshot of the market at the time of this review.
Overclocking
Using only the the ATI Overdrive™ facility built into the driver control panel, the maximum overclock we were able to obtain from the Sapphire HD 4830 was 700MHz on the core and 1020MHz on the memory. This is an extremely impressive bump in performance considering the 575/900MHz stock speeds of the cards, and should go a long way to matching the performance of its bigger brother, the 4850.
Had any of the other overclocking tools we attempted to use on Vista x64 worked with the HD 4830, we’re fairly certain that the 700MHz core speed could have been increased further. Maybe not by much, but the card certainly felt like it had at least another 10-20MHz in the core before we would start running into problems.
In addition, the “Auto-Tune” facility built into the drivers did attemt to overclock the Memory to 1090MHz. However as soon as we performed any kind of benchmarking or artifact testing, the entire system would lock up with a BSOD.
