Sapphire HD 4830 Video Card Review

[Hardware Secrets Team]

There has been a new article posted.

Title: Sapphire HD 4830 Video Card Review
URL: http://www.hardwaresecrets.com/article/641

Here is a snippet:
"*The recently launched Radeon HD 4830 is basically a capped Radeon HD 4850, running at lower clock rates and having less graphics processors *available, but offering a far more attractive price tag th..."

Comments on this article are welcome.

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Hardware Secrets Team
http://www.hardwaresecrets.com

[Olle P]

Originally Posted by Page one

... Sapphire decided to use its own cooler instead of using the infamous standard cooler designed by ATI/AMD, which is heavy and known to heat a lot, increasing the temperature inside your PC.

I understand the "heavy" bit, but "increasing the temperature" is what every single cooler will do to the very same amount, unless they blow the heated air straight out from the case. The heat is generated by the graphics card, not by the cooler.
Sapphire's cooler doesn't ventilate the heat and so will increase the case temperature just as much as the reference cooler.

Furthermore you don't make any actual comparison between the coolers' weight, nor comment the cooling performance of Sapphire's version.
Does the GPU run hot, or does it stay well within the margins?

Originally Posted by Conclusions

Radeon HD 4830 is a technical tie with GeForce 9800 GT, so basically your choice will be based on the games, resolutions and image quality settings you use...

To me the important technical differences are:
- Radeon support up to SM 4.1, GeForce support up to SM 4.0.
- Radeon does not support fog tables, GeForce do support fog tables.

I use Windows XP and so will benefit from neither SM 4.0 nor 4.1.
I like to play Combat Mission, and therefore think of fog tables as a very important feature. (I did use a Radeon LT Rage Pro in a rental computer about a decade ago, that became a real pain when the first Combat Mission was released in the summer of 2000. Less than half a year later I'd had it and bought myself a complete new rig with GeForce256, even though there was almost a full year left on my computer rental contract! )

Care to guess my pick in this choice between Radeon or GeForce?

Cheers
Olle