In these trying economic times, it's hard to justify the cost of a high performance graphics card, especially when you consider that video cards are superceded at least once every half year, and subject to the law of diminishing returns, the more you pay, the less increase in performance you get. For those who are financially conservative, the object of our desire is the best product for the price, or also the best bang for your buck. Earlier this year, ATI released the Radeon HD 4850, an excellent card at an excellent price. And it offered so much value that in reaction, NVIDIA immediately lowered the price on their GeForce 9800 GTX, and after that they quickly pushed out the improved GTX+ version. - SilentPCReview

ATI Radeon HD 4830 Graphics Design Edition Review

The Radeon HD 4800 series is one of ATI's most successful in recently memory, and also one of the most wide ranging. There's the Radeon HD 4870 X2 at the top, widely lauded as the best performance graphics card on the market followed by the Radeon HD 4870 and HD 4850. With the Radeon HD 4670 going for $80 and the Radeon HD 4850 for $170, it was logical for ATI to fill the price gap. And at $130, the Radeon HD 4830 looks to follow in the tradition of its brethren and represent very good value. The Radeon HD 4830 is essentially a cut-down version of the Radeon HD 4850 graphics card, which a far better price tag.

Its core and memory speeds have been reduced and it features only 640 stream processing units down from the 800 available. These small differences shouldn't affect performance too much but it should be easier to cool and consume less power than the Radeon HD 4850. Our Radeon HD 4830 sample came straight from ATI with no packaging of any kind. When shopping for a Radeon HD 4830, check the specifications carefully as manufacturers do not always follow the reference design, so different Radeon HD 4830's may have various video outputs, core and memory speeds, memory type and coolers.

The general consensus is that the performance of the Radeon HD 4830 card is in between the GeForce 9800 GT and GTX edition. The video playback was very good and the decoding hardware has not changed from the previous Radeon HD 4800 series cards. The stock cooler is an average performer, it kept the GPU at adequate temperatures. When idle, the noise level was good and its nastier attributes were all but muffled once installed in a system with the side cover in place. At full load, it was very noisy by our standards which is typical for most graphics cards, though less significant with NVIDIA based boards.

In our opinion, the Radeon HD 4830 card represents the best middle of the road graphics card for those who want to have a good gaming experience without breaking the bank or driving up the electric bill. It's not one of those revolutionary cards that crushes the competition and redefines value, but it performs well and is priced aggressively and enough to push the GeForce 9800 GT completely out of the picture. Our main complaint is the stock reference cooler and its poor fan qualities. If you only need it to be quiet at idle, it's a fine card, but once you start to push it, the noise level goes up while the its quality goes down.