We are no strangers to the Radeon HD 4830 card, as we have tested a couple of them so far, and it's evident that these boards offer great bang for your buck. It's more than enough for the less demanding weekend gamers, since it will enable pleasant gaming on lower resolutions. It's currently priced at around $115, which is less than the Radeon HD 4850 and slightly more than the Radeon HD 4670, so it fills this performance gap quite nicely. This card is based on the RV770 graphics processor, the one you will see on models from the Radeon HD 4850 all the way up to their Radeon HD 4870 X2 which is powered by two of these chips and currently still holding the gaming performance crown. - FudZilla

Gainward Radeon HD 4830 Dual Cooling Style Review

It's somehow common practice to cripple the chip for use on weaker cards, so the Radeon HD 4830 card features 640 stream processors. Although 640 stream processors doesn't sound like much after considering that the RV770 features 800 shaders, bear in mind that it's still twice as much as ATI's last year top card Radeon HD 3870. The Radeon HD 4830's core runs at 575MHz with the memory running at 1800MHz. Our today's card, the Gainward Radeon HD 4830 kept the reference speeds, so no surprises there. The card features a large cooler with the fan in the middle and as such the Gainward version takes up two slots.

Gainward also moved the power components to the unused area of the PCB, towards the DVI outs, so the printed board is shorter than the reference one. We see that two phases are used for the GPU and one for the memory. Although the reference cooling is good and gets the job done, Gainward still ended up using the aforementioned dual slot cooling with a fan. It's louder than the reference solution, but it does a much better job of cooling. Of course, you can use the Catalyst control center to change the fan speed, but even at minimum 20% it's still as loud as the reference cooler but offers more overclocking headroom.

The Gainward Radeon HD 4830 is another non reference card, characterized by a large dual slot cooler. The cooler does a great job and keeps the small 55nm core temperatures at about 50°C, which is 30°C cooler than the reference card with their single slot cooling. Although it does a great job of cooling, we can't say that it's very quiet, as noise levels are about the same as with reference cooling. By moving the power components to the unused part of the PCB, Gainward cut the length of the card by quite a margin. The core runs at reference 575MHz and the memory at 1800MHz clock speed but benefits from their custom cooler.

It's a well known fact that the Radeon HD 4830 is a nice overclocker and we had no trouble pushing it up to 700MHz for the core and 2000MHz for the memory. The core temperatures went up by only 4°C, which is still 29°C less than on the reference card. The Gainward Radeon HD 4830 will provide some nice gaming potential, but don't expect to be gaming at extra high resolutions with filters on. If you're on the prowl for a sub $115 card, we sincerely recommend it.