So I was in Hong Kong last Sunday looking for my next pc, and when I saw the HIS 4830 for 75 quid I gave in and bought 2 of these together with P5Q Pro for a cheap crossfire setup. The 9800GX2 I had back in the UK packed a lot of punch and I was hoping to match that performance with as little money as possible. Having played with SLI now I really want to have a go at crossfire since people say it scales better. Besides I didn’t find any 4830 crossfire review on google so thought it would be a good idea to share my results here.
My specs are:
Q6600 @ 3.375Ghz 375x9 with AC Freezer 7 Pro
P5Q Pro 1406 BIOS – PCIE @ 105Mhz
G.Skill 4Gb PC6400C4 @ 900Mhz 5-5-5-15
2x HIS 4830 @ 650/1000Mhz
Seagate 160Gb SATA2
Vista x64 SP1
Catalyst 8.10 (not hotfix driver as I couldn’t get it to install)
I will be testing the following games at 1680x1050 & 1920x1080 (16:9) with the cards overclocked to 650/1000Mhz, having said that since both 4830 and 4850 are pretty much identical anyway apart from the sps and most probably came from the same production line I’d consider that as stock speed really. I could only manage to push the PCIE bus speed to 105Mhz to reduce the bandwidth limitation a little.
HL2 CSS benchmark - All settings maxed out, capped at 300fps.
3DMark Vantage – the GPU scored 11057 at performance preset which I thought was pretty good, only a few hundreds off a heavily oced 9800GX2 in the Vantage benchmark thread.
Crysis Warhead DX10 – The tests ran with Gamers preset in DX10, 1920x1080 didn’t display properly on my monitor but judging by the results I believed it was rendered at 1920x1080.
Far Cry 2 – relatively low comparing to the far cry 2 benchmark thread, I’ll have to do a rerun of this test once I get the hotfix driver or wait for 8.11. I used the same test parameters as the far cry 2 benchmark thread – ranch demo flythrough with everything max DX10 and noaa. Performance at 1920x1080 is surprisingly higher than at 1680x1050, again it may be a driver issue.
Devil May Cry 4 DX10 – Everything at superhigh with 8xMSAA.
Company of Heroes DX10 – used the in-game benchmark with maxed out settings, it seems to cap at 60fps for some reason even without vsync.
As I don’t have other cards for comparison here I can’t really make any useful verdict, so do compare it with your own results. For the price I paid I think it’s a bargain but at its current price in the UK people are still better off getting a cheapo 4850 instead. And before you say it yes I do realize it’s only 2x 8 lanes PCIE crossfire but I decided the X48 is just not worth the extra. As far as I know the difference between dual 8x PCIE and dual 16x PCIE crossfire only becomes significant at high resolutions. For anyone who’s interested there is a very good review at tweak town comparing crossfire performance between P45 and X48 here.
*word of warning* neither card came with any crossfire bridge despite all review sites saying they do so I had to source one from elsewhere.
*word of warning 2* one of the cards’ fan is playing up from the start – it sometimes won’t spin up when the pc turns on unless you start it manually with your finger. I didn’t realize this at first until vista was installed and the card was scorching hot! Hopefully it’s an isolated case but look out for this if you by any chance get this card.
*word of warning 3* one of the card is actually an early batch with only 560 stream processors (same one with the dodgy fan
). However updating to newer BIOS fixed the problem.
So yeah, quite a few issues I’ve encountered so far if I’m honest. Will do more tests when I have time and update as soon as possible. Anyone know of a good benchmark tool for COD4, Brothers in Arms Hell’s Highway, and Stalker CS?
My specs are:
Q6600 @ 3.375Ghz 375x9 with AC Freezer 7 Pro
P5Q Pro 1406 BIOS – PCIE @ 105Mhz
G.Skill 4Gb PC6400C4 @ 900Mhz 5-5-5-15
2x HIS 4830 @ 650/1000Mhz
Seagate 160Gb SATA2
Vista x64 SP1
Catalyst 8.10 (not hotfix driver as I couldn’t get it to install)
I will be testing the following games at 1680x1050 & 1920x1080 (16:9) with the cards overclocked to 650/1000Mhz, having said that since both 4830 and 4850 are pretty much identical anyway apart from the sps and most probably came from the same production line I’d consider that as stock speed really. I could only manage to push the PCIE bus speed to 105Mhz to reduce the bandwidth limitation a little.
HL2 CSS benchmark - All settings maxed out, capped at 300fps.
3DMark Vantage – the GPU scored 11057 at performance preset which I thought was pretty good, only a few hundreds off a heavily oced 9800GX2 in the Vantage benchmark thread.
Crysis Warhead DX10 – The tests ran with Gamers preset in DX10, 1920x1080 didn’t display properly on my monitor but judging by the results I believed it was rendered at 1920x1080.
Far Cry 2 – relatively low comparing to the far cry 2 benchmark thread, I’ll have to do a rerun of this test once I get the hotfix driver or wait for 8.11. I used the same test parameters as the far cry 2 benchmark thread – ranch demo flythrough with everything max DX10 and noaa. Performance at 1920x1080 is surprisingly higher than at 1680x1050, again it may be a driver issue.
Devil May Cry 4 DX10 – Everything at superhigh with 8xMSAA.
Company of Heroes DX10 – used the in-game benchmark with maxed out settings, it seems to cap at 60fps for some reason even without vsync.
As I don’t have other cards for comparison here I can’t really make any useful verdict, so do compare it with your own results. For the price I paid I think it’s a bargain but at its current price in the UK people are still better off getting a cheapo 4850 instead. And before you say it yes I do realize it’s only 2x 8 lanes PCIE crossfire but I decided the X48 is just not worth the extra. As far as I know the difference between dual 8x PCIE and dual 16x PCIE crossfire only becomes significant at high resolutions. For anyone who’s interested there is a very good review at tweak town comparing crossfire performance between P45 and X48 here.
*word of warning* neither card came with any crossfire bridge despite all review sites saying they do so I had to source one from elsewhere.
*word of warning 2* one of the cards’ fan is playing up from the start – it sometimes won’t spin up when the pc turns on unless you start it manually with your finger. I didn’t realize this at first until vista was installed and the card was scorching hot! Hopefully it’s an isolated case but look out for this if you by any chance get this card.
*word of warning 3* one of the card is actually an early batch with only 560 stream processors (same one with the dodgy fan
). However updating to newer BIOS fixed the problem.So yeah, quite a few issues I’ve encountered so far if I’m honest. Will do more tests when I have time and update as soon as possible. Anyone know of a good benchmark tool for COD4, Brothers in Arms Hell’s Highway, and Stalker CS?
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