Sapphire Radeon HD 4830 – Budget Overclocking

 

Call of Duty 4 is a stunning DirectX 9.0c based game that really looks awesome and has a very full feature set. With lots of advanced lighting, smoke and water effects, the game has excellent explosions along with fast game play. Using the in-built Call Of Duty features, a 10-minute long game play demo was recorded and replayed on each of the GPU’s using the /timedemo command a total of 5 times. The highest and lowest FPS results were then removed, with an average being calculated from the remaining 3 results.

 

 

 

Moving on to the first of our “real world” gaming benchmarks, and we can see that despite the heavy overclock we applied to the HD4830, the HD4850 still manages to come out top of the charts, albeit by only a couple of FPS. However, once we move these results over to our CPF chart and combine them with the cost of each of the cards, it’s clear to see that the 4830 with an overclock applied offers the best value for money.

 

 

 

Crysis is without doubt one of the most visually stunning and hardware-challenging games to date. By using CrysisBench – a tool developed independently of Crysis – we performed a total of 5 timedemo benchmarks using a GPU-intensive pre-recorded demo. To ensure the most accurate results, the highest and lowest benchmark scores were then removed and an average calculated from the remaining three.

 

 

 

Crysis flips the results back in favour of the overclocked 4830, with the card managing to just about beat its bigger brother at all resolutions. The 9500GT puts out some laughable results, not even managing to hit 1FPS when running at 1900×1200. This makes for some very weird results on the CPF graph, with the 9500GT shooting straight off the top. Both the HD4830 at stock and overclocked offer the best performance per pound, with the HD 4850 not too far behind.