Review of the MSI R4830 - PAGE 2

Impressions

MSI's R4830 has a significantly different appearance than the standard, reference design HD 4830 that we've reviewed previously.  There are two major differences you can notice in a brief glance: the cooler, and the capacitors.

Let's start with the cooler. The HD 4830 had the same cooler as the HD 4850:  a single slot, design with a relatively small fan. MSI's R4830 has a custom cooler on it. At first glance, it appears to be fairly standard design, but it is actually rather unique. The cooler is all aluminum -- as you know, aluminum can not transfer heat as faster as some materials, such as a copper, but going with an aluminum cooler is not necessarily a bad thing at all, as MSI shows here.

The cooler's fins spread out in an ellipse shape, each fin a slightly different length. It is best avoided  to have cooling fins reach over the top of the video card, but also seems like MSI is trying to get heat to mostly radiate to the left and right of the card, not up and down, to improve the heat circulation in your case.

The aluminum is kept chill by a robust fast, high speed fan. The fan is audible, but not too loud -- I really don't expect many people will notice the sound much, once installed inside a case. The fan blades are twisted a little bit, purposely by MSI, to help push more air through the cooling fins. All in all the cooling system is very effective, and keeps the HD 4830 idling a relatively low temperatures -- for us the idling temperature hovered around 37C°.

The second very noticeable feature of the R4830 is the layout of the capacitors, running along the right side of the PCB. On the reference board HD 4830 / HD 4850, the capacitors are mushed together up above the cooler, on the R4830 they are aligned in a more civilized style, in a vertically arranged strip. The MSI R4830 boasts '4+1 Power Phase' technology which means that both your memory and your GPU will be supplied with a steady, strong currents to keep them rock steady and stable, particularly when stressed. 4+1 Power Phases (the '1' is going to the card's memory, the other 4 devoted to the GPU) also means that your R4830 will have a better chance of living longer.

As all HD 4800 series cards have, the R4830 features the following:  DirectX 10.1 support, Shader Model 4.1, Unified Video Decoder (for optimized playback for HD video), HDMI output with 7.1 surround sound, and CrossFireX support, allowing you to link your HD4830 with up to three more ATI cards, if you have a compatible motherboard. 

Specifications

The R4830 has two other things going for it, over a regular HD4830: a factory overclock, and good memory chips.

The overclock is fairly unsubstantial: actually -- sorry MSI -- but it is so far the lamest overclocking we've seen in some time, at an incredibly modest 10 MHz boost to the core clock, and no boost to the memory. But, speaking of which, the memory would be able to handle a factory overclock with out issue at all, because this card uses 512MB of Samsung K4J52324QH-HJ1A GDDR3 memory. This memory is rated for up to 1000 MHz (100 MHz more than the default speed), and should be able to overclock above the 1000 MHz without much trouble.

As we got into our own overclocking (see page 4) we were left our scratching our head, wondering why MSI didn't step up the overclock a bit, after going through all the work of designing such a seemingly capable HD 4830.