Sapphire Radeon HD4830 512MB DDR3 Dual DVI / TVO PCI-Express Graphics Card

I bought this card at Amazon for $110 in December 2008. The free shipping service took about a week. Card installed without any problems and the included drivers are already the latest. I was thinking about getting an Nvidia 9800GT, but this board is comparable in performance and runs much cooler and quieter (around 44C under load). I was also thinking of ordering its bigger brother 4850, but reading all these reviews about how hot that cards run made me run away. This card is about 1 to 2 inch shorter than the nvidia cards, which I really like. The cooler will block one of the lower slots, hence taking two slots. One caveat is that this card will not support any operating systems older than Windows XP. I wanted to test this card on my older system with Windows 2000 and the drivers would not support it. Overall highly recommended. Sapphire did a great job here.

At the time of this writing this Sapphire Radeon HD 4830 is the king of the hill for budget graphics cards. I can play CoDWaW with all the settings maxed out on my Core2 E8400 (8GB RAM). The fan can be a little loud when you are not gaming so I connected a fan controller to turn it down when things are quiet.

I used the latest Catalyst Control Panel and driver release and things are running great. The included heatsink is well-made for a factory install. I read many great reviews of this card and my experience has been that it is a great card for the money if you want to play the latest games but can't swing $300-500 on a video card.

Sapphire is one of the top companies for making video cards and this one is no exception to their fine line of hardware. This thing has processing power that would have cost many hundreds of dollars just a couple years ago and it can now be found for around $100 or so. Make sure your PSU has the needed plug (a 6 pin PCI power...Read more

I had moved away from ATI for a number of years, swearing by nvidia products. While I still like the ease of install and seemingly more compatible drivers, you cannot argue ATI has taken over the budget card business as of this writing. While nvidia is rebadging old chips then renaming with few advancements for the budget conscious buyers, ATI and Sapphire seem to be targeting this audience with near cutting edge products users love. I have never been a big PC gamer but I do care about performance and this card performs and cannot be beat for the price.

Sapphire's Radeon 4830 card is top notch regardless of where you do your research before purchase. I looked at many cards for this recent build, my first all new PC in 3 years.

System specs: Vista 64 Ultimate, AMD Phenom 9850, Asus M3A78, 8 GB OCZ Plat DDR2 1066, 2TB HDD (WD Blacks), Sapphire Radeon 4830, HD Audio, OCZ 600 PSupply, Coolermaster CM690 case w/6 X 120mm fans