When you look at the Radeon HD 4830 in isolation, only comparing it to what Nvidia has on the market at the moment, it's a pretty good buy if you only care about frame rates in games, but unfortunately the world doesn't work that way. There's a certain card called the Radeon HD 4850, which is not only at least 15 percent faster (and more often than not the margin is greater than 20 percent) in games, but is also available for just over £100 including VAT, making it only £10 more expensive.

Of course, the card we've just linked doesn't have the best cooler on it in the world, but then neither does the HIS Radeon HD 4830 we've looked at here (when it comes to build quality). What's more, HIS has essentially cannibalised the reference design PCB by pulling components off while keeping the card functional in order to cut costs down. Cannibalising is probably a little strong because the card works fine in all but World in Conflict (where it black-screened when loading save points and starting a new game) and it overclocked beyond specification as well, although not as far as we'd hoped. Some would argue that it's a clever optimisation of the AMD reference design designed to keep costs down.



Link: Bit Tech