Sapphire HD 4830 Review
Submitted By steven on Dec 9 2008 at 6:45 PM
Introduction
Sapphire's HD 4830
The RV770, released earlier this year, marked ATI's proper return to the competitive fold. This GPU was unlike anything we had seen before. ATI had completely reinvented their approach to the Graphics Processing Unit with the RV770, and such a substantial shift in design and manufacturing philosophies is always a sizable gamble. But the concept was simple. ATI were to rely on small, streamlined GPUs, and use the scaling of those products to address each level of the market place.
The RV770 was perfectly adaptable for this new concept and made its way into each of the HD 4800 series of graphics cards. Specifically the HD 4850 at the $200 level, the HD 4870 at $300, and it also appeared in the HD 4870X2 at the premium $400 level. As the company's high-end products wrapped up and fit into their sections of the market, ATI then turned its focus to production of sub-$100 mainstream graphics cards. In September, ATI successfully introduced the HD 4600 series graphics cards to the marketplace. However, there was a small problem. By introducing the 4600 series at a sub-$100 price, as well as keeping the popular HD 4850 at its sub-$200 level, a pretty sizable gap in the product line up became obvious. A void ATI hopes to fill with the HD 4830.
| Feature | HD 4650 | HD 4670 | HD 4830 | HD 4850 | HD 4870 |
| Shader Units | 320 | 320 | 640 | 800 | 800 |
| ROPs | 8 | 8 | 16 | 16 | 16 |
| TMUs | 16 | 16 | 32 | 40 | 40 |
| Core | RV730 | RV730 | RV770 | RV770 | RV770 |
| Transistors | 514 million | 514 million | 956 million | 956 million | 956 million |
| Memory Size | 256 or 512 | 256 or 512 | 512 | 512 or 1024 | 512 or 1024 |
| Memory Bus Width | 128-bit | 128-bit | 256-bit | 256-bit | 256-bit |
| Memory Bandwidth | 21.3 GB | 32 GB | 57.6 GB | 63.6 GB | 128 GB |
| Core Clock | 600 MHz | 750 MHz | 575 MHz | 625 MHz | 750 MHz |
| Memory Clock | 667 MHz | 1 GHz | 900 MHz | 900 MHz | 1 GHz |
| MSRP | $69 | $79 | sub-$150 | $150-$199 | $200-$299 |
As one can assume given its series number, the HD 4830 is based on the RV770 GPU used in the high-end HD 4000 series; albeit in a rather cutback form. The “full” RV770 holds 10 SIMD units, with each SIMD unit consisting of 16x 5-way shader processors, and four TMUs. On the other hand, the RV770 contained within the HD 4830 only has 8 SIMD units, each with 16x 5-way shader processors and four TMUs. This difference in the number of SIMD units reveals why the HD 4830 has 640 stream processors and 32 TMUs, while its bigger brothers get 800 stream processors and 40 TMUs. As the chart indicates, ATI left its ROP count at 16. The HD 4830's modest RV770 maintains a stock core clock speed of 575 mhz and is paired with 512mb of GDDR3 clocked at 900mhz (on a 256-bit bus) resulting in a total of 57.6 Gb of memory bandwidth.
The subject of this review is the Sapphire HD 4830 512mb (model 100265L), which adheres to the reference specifications set by ATI. Unlike initial samples of the HD 4830, the Sapphire used here is equipped with a rather large double-slot cooling system – which will be described in more detail shortly.
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