# AMD's ATI Radeon HD 4830 512M



## W1zzard (Oct 22, 2008)

Today AMD launches their new HD 4830 Series. The cards come with a reduced shader count of 640 and lower clocks to fit into the $100 to $150 segment. In our testing we saw amazing overclocking of over 30% which should bring the card much closer to more expensive solutions.

*Show full review*


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## WarEagleAU (Oct 23, 2008)

Aside from the 560 shaders instead of 640, that overclock is phenomenal. I wonder why Power colors didnt oc as well on both.


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## Mussels (Oct 23, 2008)

WarEagleAU said:


> Aside from the 560 shaders instead of 640, that overclock is phenomenal. I wonder why Power colors didnt oc as well on both.



it could be the shaders. Perhaps disabling some let it OC higher.

Since wizz could disable them on the fly, i wonder if he'd be willing to do some OC tests with reduced shaders, and see if its worth it from a performance stand point...


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## DrPepper (Oct 23, 2008)

Did anyone notice that the 9600GSO performs better than every card in world in conflict in the review


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## HTC (Oct 23, 2008)

If it is possible for this card to run @ such low MHz when in 2D, i'm perplexed as to why doesn't Powercolor leave the 500 MHz 2D speed. It doesn't have to be as low as this AMD card: about 300 MHz would be enough, IMO as it would make a nice reduction in power consumption while in 2D.

Unless this lower shaders thingy has something to do with it, i honestly can't thing of a reason why it is this way


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## Wester547 (Oct 23, 2008)

Good review. The 4830 looks like a good deal as an overall.

By the by, did it come to anyone's notice how the 9500 GT is pushing past the 8600 GTS now? I know most don't care about what many see to be such paltry, low end boards as of the time of this posting, but if my recollection serves me right the 9500 GT was supposed to be _about_ as fast as the 8600 GTS, not like... 10% faster. nVidia must have brought some damn good driver ameliorations to the table (unless the 9500 GT here is overclocked).


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## aj28 (Oct 26, 2008)

Mussels said:


> it could be the shaders. Perhaps disabling some let it OC higher.
> 
> Since wizz could disable them on the fly, i wonder if he'd be willing to do some OC tests with reduced shaders, and see if its worth it from a performance stand point...



Well, the real big jump is in the memory clock, but they both use the exact same memory chips. My guess is one of two factors is at work here: 1) The custom PCB is either shoddy or skimped on the memory power circuitry, or 2) The AMD BIOS allowed for on-the-fly timing adjustments and the Powercolor did not.

Either are plausible in my book, but the question the overclocks really raise is this - Is this thing actually _better_ than the 4850 as a whole? The low-SP AMD version makes it an especially curious situation... Looking at how much power can apparently be saved by disabling SP's, and how little it impacts real-world performance, what if you took one of these to its limits in clock speed? What would the power consumption and temp graphs look like compared side-by-side with a 4850? That may well seal the deal for me, as these are the two cards I'm going between right now...


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## MarcusTaz (Oct 27, 2008)

http://www.theinquirer.net/gb/inquirer/news/2008/10/27/amd-admits-borked-ati-radeon-hd


Why was Bit-Tech given the credit instead of TPU and W1z? The inquirer.... BLAAAAAA


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## grunt_408 (Dec 9, 2008)

Looks like a great little budget gpu I could see a lot of these selling for HTPC's.


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## kysg (Dec 10, 2008)

forget HTPC's were talking bang for buck card.  add it next to the 4670


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