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PowerColor Radeon HD 4830

Michael Brown — Wed, 22 Jul 2009 22:35:00 -0500

Chop, chop!

The Radeon HD 4830 at the heart of this card is a cut-down version of AMD’s second-best graphics processor, the RV770. The 4830 has 640 stream processors, compared to the 800 processors in a higher-end card such as the Radeon HD 4870.

The 4830 is designed to run at slower clock speeds, too, and PowerColor sets this model to operate its core at 575MHz and its 512MB of GDDR3 memory at 900MHz. These are pretty hobbled specs compared to those of the reference-design Radeon HD 4870, which boasts core and memory clock rates of 780MHz and 1GHz, respectively.

If PowerColor's Radeon HD 4830 didn't have such a noisy fan, we could at least recommend it as a home-theater solution.

PowerColor also departs from AMD’s reference design by slapping on an oversized cooler. The RV770 is known to run warm, so we applaud the decision. Bear in mind, however, that the heatsink and fan will obscure whatever slot is adjacent to the card.

We also cheer the company’s decision to include an HDMI port right on the mounting bracket, eliminating the need for an adapter that will add nearly two inches to your PC’s overall depth. When you shove your computer into your entertainment center, two inches can mean the difference between success and failure.

But the Radeon HD 4830 fails to meet our minimum gaming performance requirements, delivering Crysis at 53.5fps and Far Cry 2 at 52.7fps. And since this particular card is too noisy to be considered for a home-theater PC, we can’t recommend it to enthusiasts for that application, either.

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PowerColor Radeon HD 4850

EVGA GeForce 9800 GT

EVGA GeForce GTX 260 Core 216

HIS IceQ 4+ Radeon HD 4870

EVGA GeForce GTX 275

PowerColor Radeon HD 4850

Michael Brown — Wed, 22 Jul 2009 22:34:00 -0500

A solid value, especially for a home-theater PC

Whereas AMD’s Radeon HD 4830 resembles a Radeon 4870 after a partial lobotomy, the Radeon HD 4850 that sits between these two cards comes with a full complement of 800 stream processors. But don’t make the mistake of thinking you can overclock a 4850 board to achieve the same performance as one based on the 4870: The latter uses GDDR5 memory while the former is limited to GDDR3.

We never thought we'd give even a qualified recommendation to a $130 videocard, but we can give this one a thumbs-up.

PowerColor nudged this card’s core clock speed a wee bit to 635MHz (10MHz above stock), but left its 512MB of memory running at a stock 993MHz. Here again, PowerColor attached a decidedly non-stock cooler to the GPU and memory, though it proved to be quieter than the larger fan on its Radeon HD 4830 board. In addition to a dual-link DVI port, PowerColor provides both an HDMI port and a DisplayPort connector on the mounting bracket—the only card in this roundup to offer such a complete array of outputs.

Delivering higher benchmark results at a street price that’s $20 lower than EVGA’s GeForce 9800 GT, PowerColor’s implementation of the Radeon HD 4850 delivers an excellent price/performance ratio. The card falls just short of our minimum performance requirements for Far Cry 2 and Crysis, but it turned in a great performance with CoD 4. Its quiet nature and native HDMI support render it worthy of consideration for a home theater.

<< Back to the Penny Wise Videocard Index

PowerColor Radeon HD 4830

EVGA GeForce 9800 GT

EVGA GeForce GTX 260 Core 216

HIS IceQ 4+ Radeon HD 4870

EVGA GeForce GTX 275

PowerColor Claims Significant Power Savings with Go! Green Series

Paul Lilly — Fri, 19 Jun 2009 09:30:08 -0500

PowerColor this week announced a new series of videocards it says are "environmentally friendly and cost efficient to the consumer." Kicking off the new Go! Green series is a pair of ATI cards - the HD 4650 and HD 4350.

Both cards come equipped with PowerColor's custom Silent Cooling Solution (SCS) passive heatsink, with the HD 4650 version adding heatpipes to the mix (SCS3). Partially as a result, PowerColor claims its HD 4650 consumes 38 percent less power than an Nvidia GeForce 9500GT videocard, while the HD 4350 boasts a 24 percent power savings over the Nvidia GeForce 8400GS. Likewise, the HD 4650 and HD 4350 offer up to 22 percent and 36 percent better performance than each one's respective Nvidia equivalent, PowerColor claims.

Availability is expected in July, but no word yet on price.

Image Credit: PowerColor

PowerColor Launches World's First 2GB Videocard

Paul Lilly — Tue, 15 Jul 2008 20:17:24 -0500

You knew it would happen sooner or later, the only question being which company would be the first to offer a 2GB graphics card? PowerColor answers that question today by annoucing the world's first videocard carrying a 2GB frame buffer. Or more accurately, the world's first desktop graphics card packing 2GB of memory, as workstation cards have already reached that milestone.

The fat frame buffer will first appear on PowerColor's PCS HD4850 built on ATI's RV770 core and use GDDR3 memory instead of the newer (and more expensive) GDDR5. PowerColor advertises a "massive memory bandwidth up to 57.6GB/sec" capable of "providing faster graphical performance," though it remains to be seen what impact the additional memory will have on gaming performance. Along with the added memory, PowerColor also says the new card will utilize its Professional Cooling System (PCS), which the company claims will result in up to a 10C drop in temps.

PowerColor certainly seems exciting over its announcements. Question is, are you?

Image Credit: PowerColor

PowerColor Radeon HD 2900 XT

Michael Brown — Mon, 10 Sep 2007 16:45:19 -0500

Having designed the graphics architecture for Microsoft’s Xbox 360, ATI’s management had boasted for months ahead of its acquisition by AMD that its engineers were experts at designing the type of unified shader architecture envisioned by DirectX 10. Imagine our surprise when the R600 not only hit the market several months after Nvidia’s take on unified architecture but that the company’s best offering can’t compete with Nvidia’s top two GPUs.

AMD, for its part, says not competing with Nvidia at the high end is all part of its master plan, that it would rather focus on the “mainstream” graphics market, where most people are actually buying new videocards. And so it has positioned the ATI Radeon HD 2900 XT in this PowerColor card to compete with cards based on Nvidia’s GeForce 8800 GTS with 640MB frame buffers. If you believe that, we’ve got some prime real estate in Afghanistan you might be interested in. No, we’re convinced AMD ran into some design problems that it just could not resolve.

The Radeon HD 2900 XT is indeed faster than Nvidia’s 640MB 8800 GTS (but not the insanely fast 8800 Ultra or the only slightly tamer 8800 GTX). It’s also street-priced about $50 higher—but that’s about what we’d expect from the faster component. What we didn’t expect is a GPU that sucks down nearly as much electrical power as an 8800 Ultra while delivering benchmark results that are about 50 percent lower. (The HD 2900 XT requires both a six-pin and an eight-pin cable connection to your power supply.)

Power consumption isn’t something you think about every day, but with energy prices soaring, you should know that our test rig (see the footnote in our benchmark chart) draws 175 watts from the wall with a single Radeon HD 2900 XT at idle. That number jumped to a shocking 318 watts while benchmarking Quake 4 and increased to a staggering 515 watts when we dropped a second card in our Bad Axe II motherboard for CrossFire testing. A single 8800 Ultra, for the sake of comparison, sucked down 192 watts at idle and 320 watts under load in the same motherboard.

Another glaring problem with the 2900 XT is the absence of any driver support for AMD’s new Unified Video Decoder, which is designed to deliver hardware support for high-definition video decoding. Without UVD support, the 2900 XT must rely on the host CPU to handle much of this workload. To be fair, none of Nvidia’s 8800-series cards feature that company’s second-generation PureVideo HD engine either (you must step down to the GeForce 8600 to get it), but at least Nvidia has the excuse that its faster designs are several months older than the 8600.

It’s also interesting to observe that the 2900 XT is considerably slower than either the 8800 GTX or the 8800 Ultra, despite having 2.5 times as many stream-processors (320 compared to 128). This fact, combined with AMD’s FUBAR driver support for UVD and the card’s massive power footprint, strengthens our opinion that the 2900 XT is just not what AMD intended.

Those foibles aside, this card boasts some impressive architecture, including a true 512-bit memory interface (the best Nvidia can offer is a 384-bit interface, and that narrows to 320 bits for the 8800 GTS that this card competes with). The chip also has a built-in programmable tessellation unit—again, based on technology already present in the Xbox 360—but this feature won’t be of much real-world use until it’s exposed in DirectX 10 (or will that be DirectX 11… or 12?). But getting back to the real world, the fact that the stream processors in Nvidia’s part are clocked at more than twice the speed of its core didn’t help the 8800 GTS outrun the 2900 XT: PowerColor’s product delivered single- and dual-card benchmark numbers that were 15- and 25-percent higher than what equivalent 8800 GTS configurations could produce.

The 2900 XT, of course, supports CrossFire—AMD’s technology for operating two videocards in a single PC. And as with the latest spins of the X1000 series, the master/slave concept has been eliminated: All HD 2000 series GPUs have a compositing chip baked right into the silicon. AMD has also jettisoned the external cables that previous-gen CrossFire cards used for communication—replacing them with simple ribbon cables that fit inside the case. As with Nvidia’s SLI technology, however, you can operate only one display while in dual-videocard mode.

Two of PowerColor’s HD 2900 XT cards running in CrossFire are indeed faster than a single 8800 Ultra, but a pair of those cards will cost you slightly more than a single Ultra. And if you swing Nvidia’s way, you can always drop in a second Ultra for even more insane performance (click here for our review of the XFX 8800 Ultra XXX Edition).

It would be easy to dismiss this card as a whiff, but it’s really not a bad product, and it’ll be a whole lot better if AMD can unlock its UVD circuits.