Reviews - Sapphire Radeon HD 4830 512MB - CrossFire making sense?

[HEXUS]

We take two Sapphire Radeon HD 4830 cards, costing £200, and watch them beat a GeForce GTX 280.

Read more.

[SiM]

What about two 4850s, costing ~£210?

[Tarinder]

That be next on the multi-GPU benchmarking list.

£105 per HD 4850 card? That's an excellent price.

[Parm]

Very good results! Two HiS 4830s for around £180 now looks interesting - sold out at the mo, though: http://www.microdirect.co.uk/Product...roductID=38913

Still not a fan of multi-GPU setups, personally. If it were available, I'd far prefer a dual-slot single-PCIe Radeon HD 4830 X2.

[Webby]

Tarinder see here http://www.lambda-tek.com/components...prodID=1579952

Parm, I agree a single card is a more elegent solution and would be prefered but if you happen to have seen the pricing for the 4850X2 well lets just say as we can see you can get 2x 4850s for £210 while a 4850X2 1GB will cost you £280 do the same to a 4830X2 and who is going to pay £250 for it?

[Salazaar]

I'm very tempted to buy another 4850 now...

[Parm]

Parm, I agree a single card is a more elegent solution and would be prefered but if you happen to have seen the pricing for the 4850X2 well lets just say as we can see you can get 2x 4850s for £210 while a 4850X2 1GB will cost you £280 do the same to a 4830X2 and who is going to pay £250 for it?

Webby, I think Sapphire launched the 4850 X2 at an awkward time. Due to the current economic climate, the poor dollar-to-pound exchange rate resulted in a price-tag that made it seem expensive compared to two standalone 4850s.

It's a bit long-winded to type up, but take a look at the section titled "The knock-on effect of the fluctuating US dollar" on this page: http://www.hexus.net/content/item.ph...=16197&page=12

I haven't checked current availability, but I've a sneaky suspicion that two 1GB Radeon HD 4850s would now be priced around the same as Sapphire's 4850 X2, if not more.

[Tarinder]

Webby,

That company uses virtual warehousing for stock, and pre- and after-sales service are non-existent, as far as I tell. I'm happy to be proved otherwise, of course.

I've had a canvass of the usual band of reputable etailers and the best price for a Radeon HD 4850 appears to be around £115.

Still, even at £230, a couple of Radeon HD 4850s will undoubtedly provide decent performance.

The point of this article was to show how a sub-£100 card could perform when aligned with another. As the conclusion states, we'll do the same for GeForce 9800 GTs and Radeon HD 4850s, as well.

[Webby]

Wasn't suggesting that you buy one just showing that it was possible to do so! Thanks for the heads up on their virtual warehousing and potential service issues, never bought from them and probably wouldn't anyway unless the price was significantly less than I could get from Scan or one of the other big etailers with a known good service record (which when you factor in postage it probably isn't especially for us Hexites with Scan postage )

And I agree for sub £200 it is a bargain performance wise as long as crossfire is working properly which it has to be said is improving all the time. I was surprised that the memory wouldn't clock any higher 1800Mhz isn't really pushing GDDR3 (the HIS IceQ4 Turbo comes at 2200MHz as standard for example) maybe they have picked lower binned chips to keep the prices down. Glad to see that the core still overclocked well though that makes it have real performance against 9800GTs (don't suppose you know how it holds up agianst a couple of them in SLI?)

As to the cost of the 4850X2 the 2Gb model is now on pre-order at Scan for £345 I could go to eBuyer and get a 4870X2 for £350 or even from Scan themselves on today only for very similar money. While the prices are obviously linked to the dollar and so as the pound drops the prices rise and it may well be that in a month when current stock bought at favourable prices has all been sold that they will begin to look more in line but at the moment it is very hard to recommend them as a good deal when you could buy 2x 1GB 4850s for £280-£290 for a saving of £55-65 or pay the little bit more for a 4870X2.

[neologan]

Very interesting results, however, i'd like to see some more games tested for Xfire solutions that are such good value like this, just to really validate how well they scale, as it's so important on a card like this (as when they don't do well, your £200 will seem like a very poor investment).

Normally i wouldn't care, but at this price it's such an option for many that i think it deserves real thorough testing, and i'd love to see it.

[MadduckUK]

dammit everything i wanted to say has been already said.

we need 2x4850 benchies

oh, and something really needs to be done with the colours on the charts, its better than it was when they were indistinguishable from each other, but now it just seems very random and confusing. you could get up to four easly distinguishable shades of red and green, then maybe a blue for whichever card the review is focusing on.. i dunno

oh and this article made the inq's daily wibble headline, which is nice

[Hansink]

Maybe the power consumption should be a not so good point, as it takes about 25 watts more than single cards solutions

[oldslow]

So is this only subject tpo Sapphire cards? Or will other brands such as HIS work?

[Webby]

So is this only subject tpo Sapphire cards? Or will other brands such as HIS work?

What do you mean?

All ATI cards can be crossfired, if that is what you mean? The HIS cards will be fine to crossfire.

[oldslow]

lol...no, I meant would the gains be similar with other crossfire brands?
Or maybe Sapphire has and ace up it's sleeve?

[Webby]

Nah all 4830's perform similarly and use the same drivers/profiles so will receive the same benefits during crossfire. The Sapphire boards are custom though rather than a reference design (same PCB used by the 4850 in case anybody was wondering).

The only differences you may see between boards are how well they overclock (but that is more down to individual chips than a particular brand) and the coolers used on both GPU and memory. I do not know of any pre-overclocked models which are currently available. Oh and the core will clock fantastically if general reviews are anything to go by 20%+ which makes the performance per pound very good.

If I was getting a 4830 then I would get the cheapest I could find ~£90 for a HIS model from MIcrodirect (when they get some stock), £95 from eBuyer for the Force3D or £96 for the Powercolor.