XFX Radeon HD 4830 hands on

I take a look at the new XFX built 4830, which shares it's PCB and cooler with both the 512MB 4850 and 1GB 4850 Radeon cards.


In the box we have a power adapter, a DVI->VGA adapter and the plug for the component video, which goes in that S-video type connector.


A dual slot cooler, quite common for these cards, which are quite power hungry and hot.


If you're planning on overclocking, do stick some ramsinks - at least - there. The MOSFETs heat up while in load and little air goes through there.


This is the card itself, which sports some rather nice thermal paste and memory pads.
The PCB is very well built, with only high-quality components. Those two electrolytic capacitors are from Panasonic, so there's also no worry about them, on the contrary.
There's little electrical noise coming from those chokes and the one that is produce is not high frequency. Top notch quality from XFX, for which you'll likely pay a well deserved premium compared to other brands.


The cooler, quite an efficient design for a video card.


I didn't do any performance measurements but did run some temperature checks running idle, loading the card with UT2004 and with the stress test from Ozone3D's Furmark. Furmark puts lots more stress in to the card than games usually do, still, it did quite well:

Temperatures: 46.5ºC idle, 55ºC UT2004, 74ºC running Furmark's stress test.

Idle noise is quite good, although not completely silent. Playing UT2k4 also doesn't spool the fan too much but Furmark did push it almost to 90%. Still, the noise produced wasn't terribly uncomfortable, just not silent. Compared to the 9600GSO, I can only deliver praise for this cooling design.
Mind you, it's not as silent as a 8800GT single slot cooler but if you want absolute silence, you should look for aftermarket solutions, as you would for the 8800GT. This is really already a very good card but not one for silence "freaks". I am one, so I'll be putting it together with the HR-03GT from Thermalright, soon.

Overcloking was also very good. The card handled 700MHz for the core and 1050MHz for the memories, up from 575 and 900, respectively. That puts it at a considerable distance from the 3200MHz in 128bit that the HD 4770 can achieve, although that particular card has a core that overclocks more and the memory also clocks pretty well.

Conclusion

If noise isn't a top priority and 4770s don't receive better PCBs soon, this card receives high marks from me and only isn't one of the top choices due to the recent price cuts on the HD 4850.
The 4770s will beat it in performance, even when taking overclocking into account, so if you don't care about aestethics or build quality, go for the 4770 or the price reduced 4850. The 4770 will also save you some on the PSU and power consumption side, you should also take that into consideration.
I think XFX cards like this are worth the extra dollars and a card to watch out for will be the rumored XFX HD 4770 with 1GB GDDR5.