Sapphire Radeon HD 4830 – Budget Overclocking

 

ET:Quake Wars is a follow-up game to Wolfenstein:Enemy Territory developed by Splash Technology. Using a modified version of id Software’s Doom 3 engine along with Mega rendering technology, the game promises high resolution textures, fast gameplay and plenty of explosions. Using the built-in recordNetDemo and timeNetDemo commands, we recorded a 5 minute online gaming session and played it back a total of 5 times at each resolution, calculating the average FPS from the median three results.

 

 

 

With both the 4830 and 4850 at stock settings, the 4850 has a clear 10FPS advantage across the entire resolution range. However, yet again when we apply our overclock to the 4830, it pushes the card ahead of its bigger brother in both the FPS and CPF results, showing the card to be amazing value for money.

 

 

Race Driver: Grid is a visually taxing game that presents a challenge to any graphics system. Results were recorded using FRAPS to log the average FPS over a 2 minute race. To ensure consistency, the same track, car and general path of travel was used in each of the 5 benchmark runs for each graphics card, with an average FPS being calculated from the median three results.

 

 

 

GRID brings the 9500GT to its knees once again, with a maximum FPS of 13.05 at 1440×900. At resolutions higher than this the game was completely unplayable (even the menu system was laggy) and no results were recorded. However, on the red side of the fence, both the 4830 and 4850 manage to muster more than acceptable framerates for smooth gameplay.

 

 

Unreal Tournament 3 the latest game in the long running Unreal series from Epic Games and Midway. The game uses the latest UE3, which combines fast gameplay along with high quality textures and lighting effects. All benchmarks were performed using UTbench with a fly-by of the DM-BioHazard map. As usual, all benchmarks were performed 5 times, with the highest and lowest results being removed and an average calculated from the remaining three.

 

 

 

Once again the 4830 and 4850 leave the 9500GT in the dust, churning out 2x higher FPS results across all resolutions. At stock settings the 4850 offers slightly higher FPS than the 4830, while the 4830 comes out as slightly better value in our CPF results. This is further reinforced once the overclock is applied to the 4830, with the card costing less than £1 per FPS even at 1900×1200.