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 Radeon 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 575MHz core and 1800MHz 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 and a dual slot cooler. Also included is a native HDMI output which emphasizes the use as a media PC card. - techPowerUp

PowerColor Radeon HD 4830 512MB Graphics Review

The Radeon HD 4830 card comes in the typical PowerColor packaging, nothing here to see. Unlike the AMD reference design, PowerColor has chosen to use a big dual slot cooler which should drop the temperatures quite a bit. The card has one DVI port, one analog port and one HDMI port. Powercolor's heatsink does not use any fancy heatpipes or copper, the temperatures are still lower than the AMD reference design. And yes two, three or four Radeon HD 4830 cards can be combined in CrossFire to improve the performance or image quality, which is certainly a great option at this reduced price range and technology.

You can also combine the Radeon HD 4830 with the Radeon HD 4850, but then the Radeon HD 4850 will be slowed down to match the speed of the Radeon HD 4830. And a single 6-pin PCI Express power connector is required to power the card. The GDDR3 memory chips are made by Qimonda and carry a latency of 1.0ns which should be good for at least 2000MHz. Now AMD uses their RV770 chipset on the Radeon HD 4830 graphics card. Compared to the regular GPU, the number of shaders and texture unit is reduced via a locking mechanism. The GPU silicon remains the same for this change.

To find the maximum overclock of our card we used a combination of AMD internal overclocking software and our benchmarking suite. The final overclocks of our card are 754MHz core and 1886MHz memory. While the memory overclock is not very spectacular, the core overclock is. Essentially this means you can overclock your card beyond Radeon HD 4850 speeds to make up for the missing shaders. AMD's new Radeon HD 4830 is positioned to fill one of the last gaps in the GPU market price ranges. While the Radeon HD 4670 has a tight grip on the sub-$100 and the Radeon HD 4850 is a great choice in the sub-$200 range.

AMD felt there was something missing in between $100 and $200. Considering price to performance, the Radeon HD 4830 is one of the best offers on the market today only rivaled by some low-end NVIDIA cards. PowerColor has successfully improved on the AMD reference design by adding a native HDMI output which comes in handy when you want to connect your big TV. The other big change doesn't seem too wise to us though. PowerColor's big fan looks mighty at first sight, but the default fan settings make it a less than pleasant experience. For a card in this performance class the fan is way too noisy.

On the other hand the temperatures are lower than on the AMD reference design. But personally we prefer a few degrees higher GPU temperature in return for a quiet card. While PowerColor's sample is not affected by the missing shaders issue, it is completely unknown if the problem is limited to AMD samples only or if board partners are sending out cards with missing shaders too.