Whoops: Some Radeon HD 4830 cards are gimpy(less than 640 shaders)

Whoops: Some Radeon HD 4830 cards are gimpy
by Scott Wasson — 1:56 PM on October 25, 2008

The Radeon HD 4830 looked pretty good upon its release, but some cards that made it into the hands of reviewers and retailers are, in fact, not what they should be. AMD has just released a statement about the matter, which says:
AMD has identified that, in addition to reference samples of the ATI Radeon™ HD 4830 boards sent to media with a pre-production BIOS potentially impacting the card’s performance, a very limited number of ATI Radeon™ HD 4830 boards were released to market with the same pre-production BIOS. This is in no way hardware related, and an updated BIOS fully resolves the performance limitation.

Through consultations with AMD board partners, it has been determined with a high degree of certainty that fewer than 400 ATI Radeon™ HD 4830 boards from one AMD board partner, HIS, have reached the market with the pre-production BIOS incorrectly provided by AMD. As only a small number of HIS-branded ATI Radeon™ HD 4830 cards are impacted, we ask any customers that purchased an HIS-branded ATI Radeon™ HD 4830 to test the board using the GPU-Z utility (available at http://www.techpowerup.com/gpuz). If the GPU-Z utility reports fewer than 640 shaders, please visit the HIS website for information on how to update the card BIOS via a downloadable install utility.

If you've purchased one of these cards, you will very much want to check and be sure you aren't leaving some performance on the table.

As I noted in the comments to our Radeon HD 4830 review, our 4830 card was one of those affected. I've already confirmed a minor performance increase with an updated BIOS. I plan to update the numbers in our review, but doing so may take some time due to other pressing obligations.


*********I posted a similar thread to this. Someone insisted those will never make their way to the retail channel. So begins the infamous 560(or less shader) to 640 shader mod! I remember the 9500--->9700 mod by unlocking additional pipes! I think there also was the x800gt(o) mod as well. The question remains, what percentage of HD 4830s will NOT be able to mod? Will the card die/fail, will you see checkerboards/artifacts? Does any attempt to mod any Radeons void the warranty?

First off, this is old news.
Secondly, if you bothered to read the article you posted, your questions would have been answered.

I guess it must be memory bandwith limited then.

I do not appreciate the rude remark. What if you kill the card flashing the bios? You may be out $130!

Then whats the point of the hd4850 for it's extra 25% shaders if it's performance is gonna be something like 7% higher? The benchmarks does show the hd4850 being 20% faster, perhaps the higher clocks make up 2/3 of that difference. You could simply overclock the hd4830 and easily match the hd4850. Overclocking the hd4850 would put it a few % ahead, is that worth the extra money?