ATI recently added a new graphics card to the Radeon HD 4800 series, the ATI Radeon HD 4830, mainly to compete with the GeForce 9800 GT. A budget card aimed at the lower segment for everyday users to give their systems a little boost in power to claim their own gaming systems. The card samples sent out by AMD did show up with 560 shader processors instead of the 640 as specified, however a quick BIOS flash gave us access to original Radeon HD 4830 specifications for our benchmarks. Although it was certainly something strange to have samples straight from AMD that didn't follow the actual specifications and came with less shaders. But glad it could be easily resolved. - t-break

ATI Radeon HD 4830 (RV770) Graphics Board Review

The blood red ATI Radeon HD 4830 size is identical to that of the Radeon HD 4850. It also makes up as a single slot card taking up little place in your setup. On the rear end, the Radeon HD 4830 has two DVI ports and a single video output. Two CrossFire connecters in the top corner allow up to four cards in a CrossFireX setup. The card needs a 6-pin power cable to power the card to its full performance. We stripped the heatsink off the card to reveal the source of all the Radeon HD 4830's goodness, a 55nm based GPU clocked at 575MHz with 640 shaders processors, as well as 512MB of Qimonda GDDR3 chips.

The ATI Radeon HD 4830 with the reduced 640 shader processors compared to the 800 of its Radeon HD 4800 series relatives still managed to put up some decent performances when compared to the NVIDIA GeForce 9800 GT cards. The features remain pretty much the same as the rest of the Radeon HD 4800 family. The RV770 GPU on the Radeon HD 4830 opens doors to overclock to even higher clock speeds than the Radeon HD 4850. This makes the Radeon HD 4830 the best bang of the buck card right now. This card comes at a very nice price and does have great performance, with some extra to be unlocked.

Performance wise its a perfect deal, as a single card or two cards in CrossFire, the Radeon HD 4830 managed to outperform the GeForce 9800 GT on most of the games. So if you really can't spend more on a high-end card or want a CrossFire setup for less, this is the without a doubt the way forward. We did try to overclock the Radeon HD 4830 and we ended up hitting 2200MHz on the memory and 725MHz on the core. The temperatures were 54°C idle and 84°C at load, which means the board does still have some overclocking potential but beyond our reach as we hit maximum, but perhaps with a better cooling solution.

Being a budget gaming card from AMD it still gets the heatsink really hot, just as the other Radeon HD 4800 series cards. This can be adjusted by using the new Catalyst drivers to control the fan manually to drop the temperatures at the expense of added noise. So even though it's a more affordable card, you'd be better off looking into aftermarket cooling solutions. The ATI Radeon HD 4830 selling price in the local market is expected to be in the tune of $150 to $200 depending on the manufacturer.