AMD introduced the budget-friendly ATI Radeon HD 4830 graphics card this week to fill in the gaps of its new line of Radeon HD series..
The newly launched ATI Radeon HD 4830 offers excellent performance for gamers on a budget. Priced officially at less than $150, the card is already appearing at online retailers for just $109, after a $20 mail-in rebate, which puts it in direct competition with the Nvidia Geforce 9600GT and 9800GT.
The ATI Radeon HD 4830 is based on RV770LE silicon, which is essentially a crippled version of the RV770 silicon found in the ATI Radeon HD 4850 and 4870. The ATI Radeon HD 4830 features 640 stream processing units, 956 million transistors and a 256-bit GDDR3 memory interface. The clock speed and memory clock are set at 575 MHz and 1800 MHz, respectively, which are only a bit lower than those of the ATI Radeon HD 4850. Texture units total 32, compared to the 40 found in the ATI Radeon HD 4850, but both come with 512 MB of GDDR3 memory and a peak power consumption of about 110 W.
The ATI Radeon HD 4830 comes with support for DirectX 10.1, hardware video acceleration, CrossFireX, two dual-link DVI display ports, HDMI with integrated HD audio controller and DisplayPort. From early reviews online, the ATI Radeon HD 4830 seems to offer good mid-range performance with decent gaming capabilities. The performance of the ATI Radeon HD 4830 is nearly twice that of the ATI Radeon HD 4670 and it gives the Geforce 9800 GT a good run for its money.
For those curious about Far Cry 2 performance, the ATI Radeon HD 4830 can achieve rather playable frame rates with high image quality settings, although only at modest display resolutions. Some gamers may wish to get the ATI Radeon HD 4850 instead, especially those with older computers or larger displays. Overclocking is a risky alternative, but it would seem that the ATI Radeon HD 4830 can be overclocked to be nearly the same performance level as the ATI Radeon HD 4850, saving roughly $30.
