Radeon HD 4830: High-Speed, Cheap CrossFire

Sapphire's Radeon HD 4830

The Sapphire flavor of the 4830 comes in a small box, but it doesn’t skimp on the accessories:

Basically taking the opposite approach of the PowerColor model, Sapphire includes a host of adapters for its 4830 that allow the user to tailor the outputs to whatever he or she likes. The card sports two DVI outputs and an S-video output, but we have adapters for VGA, HDMI, composite video, and even component video. These options offer great flexibility for users with an older HDTV that doesn’t have any digital inputs.

In addition to the video adapters, the card comes with the requisite manual and driver CD. As another added bonus, a Molex-to-PCIe power adapter is included for folks with older power supplies. Unfortunately, Sapphire also chose to keep a CrossFire cable out of the bundle. This is a bit disappointing considering all of the other extras that Sapphire went out of its way to include.

Sapphire’s board is a unique animal and strays far from AMD’s reference 4830. Like PowerColor’s 4830, Sapphire uses a large dual-slot cooler in the place of the reference single-slot unit. Once again, this should provide increased cooling efficiency as well as quieter fan speeds.

The memory is Qimonda HYB18H512321BF-10 GDDR3 rated for 1, 000 MHz, which are the exact same chips used on PowerColor’s 4830 board. Sapphire chose to ignore the addition of any heat sinks or spreaders across the memory chips and we don’t think that decision will present a problem, seeing as how the card runs the memory 100 MHz below its rated speed.

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Clock speeds in 3D mode are the exact same as the reference Radeon 4830's clock speeds, which are 575 MHz core and 900 MHz memory. Interestingly, Sapphire chose very low clock speeds in 2D mode to save power and reduce heat, with only 160 MHz for the core and 250 MHz for the memory.