Introduction

Today AMD released their new Radeon HD 4830 Series of graphics cards. The cards are positioned in the $100 to $150 segment to put additional pressure on NVIDIA.

Compared to the bigger brother, the HD 4850, AMD reduced the number of shaders from 800 to 640. The number of texture units is also lower with 32 instead of 40. Last but not least, the clock frequencies were reduced to 575 MHz core and 900 MHz memory as well.

PowerColor's Radeon HD 4830 has the exact same specifications as the AMD reference design but comes with a PCB designed by PowerColor (probably for cost reasons) and a dual slot cooler (for lower temperatures). Also included is a native HDMI output which emphasizes the potential use as a media PC card. While the exact price is not known yet for the Powercolor variant, expect it to be about $10 to $15 cheaper than the AMD reference design.

PLEASE NOTE: There is an issue with the HD 4830 sample from AMD. It has only 560 shaders instead of the intended 640. That's why the scores of the AMD card are so different. The card tested in this review has 80 missing shaders and does not represent intended HD 4830 performance. Read more about this here.