Since the RV770 GPU's initial arrival, we have seen the technology used in the GPU migrate up and down AMD's product stack. At first, the RV770 powered only the ATI Radeon HD 4850 and HD 4870, but soon there after two RV770's were linked together to form the current flagship Radeon HD 4870 X2. Then the GPU was scaled down to bring out the Radeon HD 4600 series of products. Ultimately, AMD ended up with competitive offerings at virtually every price point, ranging from $39 on up, to over $550 for their flagship. There is an approximate $80 price gap between the $160 Radeon HD 4850 and the roughly $80 Radeon HD 4670, which AMD fills today with their new Radeon HD 4830. - HotHardware

ATI Radeon HD 4830 512MB Video Card Style Review

And as its name suggests, this latest addition to the Radeon HD 4800 series is similar to the Radeon HD 4850 card. In fact, the reference designs look almost identical. The Radeon HD 4830 however, has a couple of SIMD arrays disabled and hence has fewer active stream processors and texture mapping units. The Radeon HD 4830 offers DirectX 10.1 and these GPU's are manufactured on 55nm process node and the cards support ATI's CrossFireX multi-GPU technology. Because the new Radeon HD 4830 shares the same GPU as the other cards in the Radeon HD 4800 series, they have the same feature set.

The Radeon HD 4830 differs from its Radeon HD 4800 series counterparts only in its number of stream processors, texture units and clock speeds. Two of the RV770's ten SIMD arrays and associated texture units have been disabled, which results in a total of 640 active stream processors. The Radeon HD 4830's core clock has also been lowered a bit, to 575MHz. The result is less compute performance and fillrate. The memory bandwidth is down as well, but that's only because of a clock speed reduction, as the Radeon HD 4830 has the same memory bus width and there's nothing much new to see physically.

The new ATI Radeon HD 4830 performed right in line with its position in the market, the card was clearly faster than the more affordable Radeon HD 4670 and a bit slower than the pricer Radeon HD 4850. In comparison to NVIDIA's offerings, the Radeon HD 4830 is typically faster than the GeForce 9600 and about on par with or somewhat slower than a GeForce 9800 GT. In comparing the reference to PowerColor's, even though they shared the same specifications, the PowerColor Radeon HD 4830, was usually a bit faster than the reference card, probably due to slight tweaks associated with the shorter board design.

With an expected street price of around $129, the Radeon HD 4830 seems to be a solid product. If you want an affordable, no compromise graphics solution that can handle all of today's games and virtually any video decoding task, the Radeon HD 4830 should fit the bill nicely. Be aware, however, that the sub-$150 graphics card space is loaded, perhaps overloaded, with worthwhile products currently, so you could save a few bucks and get something with only slightly lower performance or spent just a few dollars more and get something faster. That is the today's choice that is on offer and that could fit any budget.

In a few weeks or months time, as older models undergo further price cuts or disappear from shelves altogether, there should be cleared differentiation in the market. So for now, just be extra diligent when shopping to ensure you're getting the best deal. If you don't feel like comparison shopping though, and the Radeon HD 4830's price is right, we doubt anyone would be disappointed in this card. The Radeon HD 4830 represents a great value for the money.