Introduction
At TechwareLabs, we often bring you reviews of the latest and greatest, top-of-the-line hardware. While this is certainly important, there’s a much larger segment of the market that often gets ignored: the budget gamer. Whether you’re a starving college student who is balancing the need to game against keeping your student loans in check, or just someone who wants to build a game-worthy system without dropping a ton of cash, there are wide range of video cards out there to meet your needs (and budget). Today we’ll be looking at Sapphire’s latest offering in the budget-gamer category, the Radeon HD 4830. At $109.99 (directron.com), this card is competitively priced, but is it worth your hard-earned cash? Let’s find out!
Packaging and First Looks
The packaging on the 4830 is tastefully done, with ATI’s Ruby Rom character featured front and center. On the back, a bit of ad copy accompanies a list of highlighted features, which we’ll go over later.
Inside, we find the card itself with all the necessary accessories: driver disc, Molex to PCI-e 6 pin power adapter, DVI->VGA adapter, DVI->HDMI adapter, S-Video->Composite adaptor, and S-Video->Component adapter. No games or extras were included with the driver software, but that’s hardly unusual for a card in this price bracket.
its difficult to see why you’ve recommended this card, when a 4770 will outperform this one in all benchmarks, and is 10 $ cheaper at the very least.
Actually, from what I can find, the 4770 ranges from $99-109, whereas the 4830 ranges from $74-109. The 4830 may not be in the same bracket now as when it was released, but it’s still got good bang for the buck.
I find it hard to believe that a card with a 128bit memory interface can compete with one with 256bit.
Actually the 128bit memory interface can indeed compete with one using a 256bit interface depending upon many other factors like overall bandwidth, GPU power, memory type and amount.