We just received a nice sample directly from AMD and this in form of the Radeon HD 4830, the smaller brother of the Radeon HD 4850 graphics card. This card was introduced some time ago to withstand some refresh from NVIDIA on their product line and having at the same time reduced the pricing of their products. As such the Radeon HD 4830 was released with less processing power as coming with only 640 shaders and just 32 texture units. At the same time the clock speeds got reduced. Doing so AMD was able to bring a quite performing product with a very nice price that is now available for around $110. The great thing about it, is that it has some great overclocking potential. - ShopTalk

ATI Radeon HD 4830 512MB Style Video Card Review

The card itself is single slot and with a red PCB, respecting fully the ATI theme. On the back of the card we see the voltage regultors that are covered with a copper plate with spikes. This design helps a lot for a better heat dissipation on that portion of the card. This card has on its PCB electrolytic capacitors, so its not fully filled with solid capacitors, which are much better. At the same location we can see the 6-pin PCI Express connector. And we can also see the thermal compound between. Even if the fan is only single slot, it is not too loud, even at the 50% speed. The fan on the Radeon HD 4670 graphics card seemed louder.

This card features two CrossFire connectors so we can add up to two cards to maximize 3D performance. In operation, the fan sucks air from inside the case and gets it through the passive copper cooler fins to keep the GPU and the memory at reasonable temperatures. On the dual slot cards we have seen, with standard design, the hot air was completely evacuated from the case. In this situation, the hot air is evacuated blows inside the case after it cools the video card components. We do not recommend putting a card like this in a case with no ventilation at all because the temperature will keep rising in the case.

From what we have researched, we have seen that this Radeon HD 4830 video card has exactly the same PCB layout compared to the AMD stock Radeon HD 4850 design. Some people even tried to flash this card with the Radeon HD 4850 based BIOS, hoping that they will recover the missing shader units. Most of them bricked their cards doing this and we do not recommend doing this to anyone. It seems that there are two possibilities, AMD has disabled them in hardware or they are simply missing. Overall, we can recommend this board for people that want to save a little and do not want to invest more money in a single card.

For optimal performance, we highly recommend users to buy another card and put it in a CrossFire configuration. And this way, the problems with the graphics intensive games at low frame rates will be solved. Though again there are better options available especially when looking at the cooling which could be better.