14 DAY TRIAL // It seems that only next week we will be able to get our hands on ATI's new graphics card, the Radeon HD 4830. According to the latest news on the web, the card is almost ready and will be heading to the market shortly. The Radeon HD 4830 will come as a direct competitor to Geforce 9800GT-based products, and it is said to be much cheaper than ATI's Radeon HD 4850.
The new graphics solution is based on the RV770LE core, which is basically an RV770PRO that has a few pipelines disabled and also comes with a slower clock and less bandwidth. Also, while the RV770XT and PRO chips feature 800 shaders, the RV770LE in Radeon HD 4830 will come only with 480 shaders. This is why the card is expected to be released by the end of next week with prices significantly lower than HD 4850.
More news on the Radeon HD 4830 card come from VR-Zone, which managed to get hold of some pictures of the board manufactured by MSI. The Micro Star International graphics solution features a 575MHz core clock speed and includes 512MB memory clocked at 1,800MHz. The MSI HD 4830 card comes with 8 Samsung K4J52324QH-HJ1A GDDR3 memory chips rated at 1ns, which total 512MB. Also, users will need a 6-pin PCIe power connector for this GPU.
According to VR-Zone, MSI plans to release the new Radeon HD 4830 card on October 23, and it will probably be priced under $150. More pictures of the MSI card are available here.
In other related news, ATI’s Radeon HD 4870 X2 is said to receive a driver hotfix that will allow it to boost performance in the upcoming Far Cry 2 title. This will be a DirectX 10.1 game, and ATI wants to leverage performance of its card to beat the Geforce GTX 280. Since the game will be launched next week, both in North America and Europe, ATI will come with the hotfix shortly, as it needs to have DirectX 10.1 support so as to go ahead Nvidia's GT200 family.