Related Articles

What a year 2008 has been for video cards.

Some real monsters came out, like the 9800 GX2, and some real fast, inexpensive cards came out as well; such as today's ATI HD 4830. This HD 4830 has been put together by MSI: overclocked and improved from the reference design, for just over a $100 USD, the MSI R4830 has a great deal of bang-for-buck potential. Today we'll check it out. 

The HD 4830 was the late-comer to the party that was the launch of ATI's HD 4800 series. The HD 4850 and HD 4870 were the first to come out, virtually at the same time, and have proven to be wildly successful -- easily getting into any list of ATI's all-time greatest hits, if one was to be made. Many sources put the number of HD 4850's and HD 4870's sold on the happy side of two million units. The power-balance between Nvidia and ATI has been really shook up, ever since the HD 4800 came on the scene. 

But where things are right now is a bit of different story. With Nvidia's release of some excellent 'Big Bang II' drivers squeezing extra frames out of a bunch of games, and the aggressive price cuts on the shader-boosted GTX 260, Nvdia is working hard on regaining their unarguably dominant position in the discrete graphics market in the last handful of years.

While the new big-gun video cards, the GTX 285 and GTX 295, seem to be peeking their heads out of the corners of CES reports, it does not look like neither Red or Green will be releasing significant products between the $100 - $200 mark until at least February. And there is a good reason for this: right now there is just a glut of cards available, for a fair prices, lower than $200.

Almost daily I read both console gamers and PC gamers complain that PC gaming is too expensive. It is high-time to dispel this fallacy. Anyone can look at the current line-up of video cards available and see that you don't need to break the bank to get very acceptable gaming performance. You don't need a crazy processor to power it either -- you can pick up a $70 Core 2 CPU, and a $70 HD 3870, a $100 motherboard, and some dirt cheap RAM and guess what: you are good to go. No need to break into a bank.

Take this HD 4830 for example. Well, take this MSI R4830 to be even less ambiguous. What do you expect a $140 USD (and sometimes even less expensive) video card might be capable of? We'll compare it to a bunch of other cards in a similar price range and see if it offers enough bargain performance to compete with all the other great deals out right now.