Sapphire Radeon HD 4830 – Budget Overclocking

 

Having already covered the HD 4830 a couple of times here on Overclock3D in the past, one thing is certainly apparent: It is by far the best budget gaming card available at the moment. For under £100 you get a card that can play even the most challenging of games such as GRID at 1900×1200 with 4xAA and high quality textures, and even cut through Crysis with a reasonable frame rate. Today we explored Sapphire’s offering and found it to not only possess all of these expected features, but was additionally also great in the overclocking department.

 

Using only the ATI Catalyst tool, the GPU speed was taken from 575MHz up to 700MHz and the Memory from 900MHz up to 1020MHz. This offered a significant FPS boost in both games and benchmarks, giving the Sapphire HD 4830 an edge over its bigger brother the 4850 in most cases. While overclocking may not be everybody’s proverbial ‘cup of tea’, the process of overclocking has been greatly simplified since the awkward days of the X1900XT. As the results over the previous few pages have shown, if you’re willing to spend just a  few minutes tweaking the HD 4830, you can bag yourself the next model up in the range for no additional expense other than your time.

 

Finally, the Sapphire HD 4830 also proved to be reasonably quiet even during heavy gaming sessions and maintained temperatures under 60°C at all times which undoubtedly attributed to its overclocking performance. If forced to nit pick the card, the non-standard PCB layout could cause problems for those looking to replace the card’s cooling with a custom solution. But taking into consideration the low price of the card and its more than acceptable stock cooling, this is highly unlikely.

 

 

 

– Great performance per pound

– Amazingly high overclocks with little effort

– Decent cooling solution.

 

– Non-standard PCB layout could hinder custom cooling

– Packaging a tad basic (but this is a budget card – what do you expect!)

 

– Nothing

 

 

 

Thanks to Sapphire for providing the HD 4830 for review. Discuss this review in our forums.