The Card

Pulling the card out of the box, we don't see anything that we haven't really seen before. Length wise we come in at the same size as the HD 4850 and we see the typical red PCB that we've become accustomed to.

MSI has opted for a larger single fan directly on top of the core that manages to make the card a dual-slot one. As far as the overall fan design goes, there isn't anything too fancy going on with no heat-pipes present or even direct contact with the memory modules.

Having a quick look around the card, we continue to see nothing out of the ordinary. Towards the back we have a single 6-pin PCI Express power connector and across the top of the card we have two Crossfire connectors.

As far as the I/O side of things goes, we have two Dual-Link DVI connectors and a single TV-Out port. As mentioned, the card is a dual-slot one and we can see there are some vents for the heat to escape.

Specifications

The HD 4850 and HD 4830 share a lot of common features; both are based on the RV770 with 16 ROPs, have 956 million transistors and both cards also run 512MB of GDDR3 and a 256-bit memory bus.

Where the cards begin to differ are the 640 shaders on the HD 4830 versus 800 on the HD 4850 along with the lower clock rates of 575MHz on the core and 1800MHz DDR on the memory. As mentioned, this card from MSI is overclocked and has had a 10MHz bump on the core, bringing it to 585MHz.