AMD's Radeon HD 4830 has been a smash hit for everyone looking for the best performance per dollar. The card is based on the RV770, the same GPU used on the Radeon HD 4850. AMD however locked the number of shaders down to just 640 units. While the original Radeon HD 4830 design was essentially a Radeon HD 4850 reference PCB, add-in board partners quickly came out with custom designs to reduce costs. Albatron is one of the first companies to offer an even further refined design that doesn't require an extra PCI Express power connector. This means that all power is supplied to the graphics card via the PCI Express expansion slot which has a maximum power limit of 75W only. - techPowerUp

Albatron Radeon HD 4830 512MB Green Style Review

Albatron sent us the card in a nice looking, yet non-descript package. We guess the final retail version will have a more refined box that lists product name and specifications. We received only the video card without any accessories. You will probably see the usual accessories included with the retail package. Compared to the Radeon HD 4830 reference design their PCB has been shortened quite a bit. Due to the cooler used the video card requires two case slots now where the reference Radeon HD 4830 used only one. This shouldn't be a problem for most users anyway. And it also comes equipped with both DVI and analog outputs.

As you can see there is no dedicated CrossFire connector for this board. There might be a chance that you can run CrossFire via the PCI Express interface. We added a reference Radeon HD 4830 to our system but didn't get any CrossFire option in the Catalyst drivers at all, maybe this only works with two Radeon HD 4830 Greens. The cooler of their Radeon HD 4830 Green edition is a fairly simple piece of technology. A large non copper baseplate soaks up heat and transfers it to cooling fins that sit directly below the fan. There are no heatpipes present, nor are they needed and also no flexible voltage regulator has been used.

Albatron's video card provides playable frame rates for any of today's games at resolutions up to mid-range widescreen. And some games however require you to ease the settings a bit, which shouldn't matter much considering you only spent $100 for the graphics card. The board does extremely well in our power consumption charts, finding competition only in the Radeon HD 4670. Though a fine look at the power consumption chart however reveals that the Radeon HD 4830 Green exceeds the 75W the PCI Express slot offers. Though such a small increase did not affect system stability in any way and has no affect either.

Even with a small overclock the card ran perfectly stable without any warnings or issues. Now the only thing that you should really worry about is the fan noise. Albatron did not implement any temperature based fan control mechanism which means the card will whine equally in idle and load. While it is not the cheapest Radeon HD 4830, the Albatron Radeon HD 4830 is not the most expensive one either. We also think that over time its price will move more towards $90 in order to compete better with other offerings in this market segment.