Garmin 830 vs 1030

I once made the mistake of buying a used Garmin on Ebay. The display failed. Even though it was within the one year warranty period, Garmin refused to replace the unit and told me I was SOL. I learned that lesson in a painful way.

The 1030 is still the best unit as the other ones really are not that useful for navigation due to the small screen. The only advantage of the 830 and 530 is the lower cost and faster processor which is certainly not as useful as a big screen to me. Since there is no problem with the speed and reliability of the 1030 (on the latest firmware) and the fact that just about all features will be backported, I see no point in downgrading a 1030 as usability is more important to me than a few grams of weight or a faster ConnectIQ benchmark (the 1030 to me seems like the right size and I can't really imagine going smaller).

Going from the 820 to 830 on the other hand is huge and probably a worthy upgrade since it is slower and wont get any new features.

1030 is 2 years old so you would assume so. The 830 uses the new Sony GPS chipset which is supposed to be significantly improved on battery pull

This is flawed thinking. A 2 year old high end laptop ALWAYS has a better processor than a brand new mid range. A 4 year old high end laptop ALWAYS has a better processor than a new budget one. CPUs have peaked, and price differentiation is king. HIgh end chips use less power and do more with more cache and higher clock speeds, and this doesn't change very quickly.
The 1030 is about 10x faster than the 820 in use, and the 830 is "2x faster" than 820.
The Sony chipset absolutely uses less power. But every device with the Sony GPS sucks ass when it comes to accuracy. What a weird trade off in a device where pace is important for training and accuracy is important for pace. I don't know a single person who has done more than 15 hours in the saddle (or even 10 hours...), and I know a lot of cyclists. Why then, would we bin off accuracy for a 20 hour battery life? Battery life was a solved problem on the Edge 820, the improvement will not improve your actual usage.

When I was on the phone with Garmin for a 1030 issue today I was asking about the 830 and they said it's their fastest processor yet, so I'd (assume) that includes the 1030. So I'd assume it's 2x that of the 1030, but I guess there are no real reports yet...so it's kinda like who knows? I'd hope this is the case. The 1030 is actually really quick to calculate routes. From the videos I've seen on the earlier 5xx 8xx models, they were pretty unbearable and 2x of those wouldn't really impress me. The Tree Benchmarks reported for the 1030 blow away the older 5xx 8xx models. From the few videos I've seen the interface on the 530/830 does appear a bit snappier than that of the 1030. The details really aren't that clear. It will be interesting if someone can compare the Tree Benchmark app from ConnectIQ on both the 1030 and these newer models. I think my brother is picking up an 830 on pre-order so I'm planning to do this since I have a 1030.

So on the DC Rainmaker review of the 830, he said Tree benchmark wasn't available yet but did run ‘Connect IQ Benchmark’ on the 530. It scores a CPU at 21.3, and a Pips at 166.7. One user commented that this makes it 2x faster than 1030, and 8-10x faster than 520/820. :eek: I feel like the 1030 is 'fast enough' and certainly WORLDS better than the 820/520 for calculating routes. But that'd be nice if it smooths out the act of sliding around maps with these new models.

This is flawed thinking. A 2 year old high end laptop ALWAYS has a better processor than a brand new mid range. A 4 year old high end laptop ALWAYS has a better processor than a new budget one. CPUs have peaked, and price differentiation is king. HIgh end chips use less power and do more with more cache and higher clock speeds, and this doesn't change very quickly.
The 1030 is about 10x faster than the 820 in use, and the 830 is "2x faster" than 820.
The Sony chipset absolutely uses less power. But every device with the Sony GPS sucks ass when it comes to accuracy. What a weird trade off in a device where pace is important for training and accuracy is important for pace. I don't know a single person who has done more than 15 hours in the saddle (or even 10 hours...), and I know a lot of cyclists. Why then, would we bin off accuracy for a 20 hour battery life? Battery life was a solved problem on the Edge 820, the improvement will not improve your actual usage.

I posted benchmarks in #7 above. Until someone does a real world comparison of performance I think that’s the best we have. 1030 4x 820 and 830 2-3x 1030. Loading a route is about the only time my 1030 struggles and it is annoying when I have to wait a few minutes at the start of a ride while it does that, I'd love a bit of extra performance and 2 or 3 times faster would make a big difference.

Older high end laptops are faster than newer low end as they use more cores, i7 vs i5 or i5 vs i3, is there any evidence we have multiple cores in any Garmin device? I'd love to see a teardown but I've never seen one of an Edge.

On battery, lots of people are only getting 5 or 6 hours on the 820. Battery was solved on the 1030, not so much the 820. Rays latest tests have shown crazy battery life, 24 hours with roughly half used. He’s testing more as that didn’t mimic real life but still.

I think Garmin has been burned by previous devices underperforming and this time they’ve under-promised on speed and battery and then significantly over delivered.

Its a great strategy which should see some very positive further reviews. They’ve really taken back the lead with these new devices as long as they don’t screw up the stability with buggy software.

I'll buy one to use as well as my 1030, and see which I prefer. I have some big climbs in the summer and not sure if the new climb pro features will be on the 1030 by then.

Have you REALLY read the reviews? Most of the new features (except TrailForks) are planned for the 1030 with a firmware update.

Where did you find this info that these new features will be included in a future 1030 firmware?

In the DC Rainmaker review: https://www.dcrainmaker.com/2019/04/garmin-edge-530-cycling-gps-in-depth-review.html

A quote from the review:
Got an Edge 1030 already? You’ll get almost every new feature you see above via firmware update to your Edge 1030. The notable exception being that the pre-loaded mountain bike Trailforks maps, due to licensing reasons.

I really don't understand why it is taking so long. Normally you can enable/disable "features" really simple in your code :))

Anyway, there is finally an option to enable/disable screens for each activity as we have on all other devices.