Test: Einzeltest: Sapphire Radeon HD 4830 512MB video card
Zitat: When we took a look at HIS´ Radeon HD 4830 board last week, we were impressed with it overall as it managed to at least achieve parity with the similarly priced GeForce 9800 GT in a number of games, and even saw fit to give its rival a bit of a kicking in a couple of the more graphically intensive titles in our testing suite.
All of this somehow makes it more ironic that we found not long after publishing the review that the board we were testing was somewhat crippled by its BIOS, which disabled one SIMD core too many and left it with less than its correct specification of 640 Stream Processors.
Thankfully, Sapphire´s offering doesn´t make the same mistake, and our sample happily tore through games with a full complement of shader units available to it. In all honesty, this increase doesn´t make a vast amount of difference in many cases (many a couple of percent increase in performance in a lot of conditions), but it did allow the Radeon HD 4830 to pick up more wins against the GeForce 9800 GT, while also extended its impressive advantages in those more shader-limited titles we just referred to. In other words, seeing the Radeon HD 4830 operating the way it´s supposed to only makes it an even more impressive offering over NVIDIA´s closest competition.
In terms of direct comparisons between Sapphire and HIS´ Radeon HD 4830 parts, these two products are differentiating themselves in terms of both cooling solution and (for a limited time at least) price. In the former category, HIS wins out by creating a part that runs cooler under load, but arguably Sapphire more than wins back that kudos thanks to taking the sensible measure of downclocking their board aggressively at idle, giving it both a much lower idle GPU temperature as well as quite significantly lower power consumption. Our particular Sapphire Radeon HD 4830 sample also won the day to an impressive degree in terms of overclocking too, although of course this may well vary from board to board.
While HIS´ take on the Radeon HD 4830 is currently listed as on sale around £10 cheaper than Sapphire´s board, the latest we´ve heard suggests that this will only be for a very limited time indeed before it comes up to the same general price point as the subject of today´s review. Thus, if you strike while the iron´s hot and manage to grab one of those cheap HIS parts you´ve really landed yourself a bargain, but beyond that (and looking at the long-term picture) Sapphire offer what could perhaps be called the more "elegant" solution from its bundle through to its idle heat and power consumption. In short though, if the Radeon HD 4830 has caught your eye as a possible purchase, to our minds it has certainly proved itself as worthy of your money over a GeForce 9800 GT overall.