This time we discovered a real pearl among Radeon HD4830 adapters, XFX Radeon HD4830 512MB who proved himself again how to make quality and highly aesthetic cards. Let's start from the beginning. Card comes in a bit bigger package, tucked in a firm modern box. There are CD/driver, instructions, power supply cable, DVI-to-D-Sub adapter, TV-Out/HDTV cables and that is all. No games, 3D marks or similar fancy accessories.
About the size. The card is in full format, with dual-slot cooler, which is covered with firm plastic. The card looks impressive for the price, actually you have feeling that this card is much more expensive. A real ‘’Dark Knight’’. Comparing with the reference models, under ‘’Knights’ ‘’armour there is a massive cooler, two slot thick, which is placed on GPU and memory chips, and is quite enough for keeping the card temperature low. In a standby mode even in closed and small cases the card is at 43-44°C, with 700-800 rpm. In the case of overloading card temperature rises up to 60°C and fan spins up to 1000 rpm. The card is still pretty silent and only becomes noisy after the fan reaches 80% of its speed, which is over 1000 rpm. This is due to the design of the fan.
XFX comes with default wrking clocks for GPU and memory, but don’t be disappointed, that doesn’t have a profound meaning, as you will see very soon! The brain of ‘’Dark Knight’’ (640 processors units packed in RV770LE) runs at 575 MHz. There is also 512 MB of GDDR3 memory, running at 1800 MHz (2×900 MHz), while fabric specifications of memory chips are actually 2000 MHz (2×1000 MHz), so latency is 1 ns.
The default settings for GPU and memory is 700MHz/2000 MHz respectively, which is maximum clock rate for GPU from Catalyst Center. The card passed all tests, and proved itself as stable, and the most respectable thing is the fact that the card reached the temperatures of 61-62°C at maximum overload, so overclock literally has no influence on temperature thanks to extraordinary cooling system!
By using Riva Tuner, the stable parameters for this test sample XFX card are 740 MHz for GPU and 2170 MHZ for memory. It is almost 30% acceleration for GPU and about 20% for memory.
Finally, we have to mansion that this type of cards in XrossFire regime can perform as much more expensive graphic adapters.
The card has excellent ratio of price/performance. XFX engineers did an excellent job. How much can a 100€ card give you, including a very chip machine, previous results showed you. For those with 19’’, 20’’ and 22’’ monitors and resolutions at 1680×1050 (1600×1200) this card will satisfy most of their needs. Even the owners of Full HD monitors (1920×1080) can use the potentials of this card.
XGCDB team.
