14 DAY TRIAL // AMD's latest graphics card, the Radeon HD 4830, was launched just last week, and reviews of the card already surfaced the web. Judging by what we've seen, the company kept its word, as the card is a great solution for the sub-$150 area. Moreover, when compared to the NVIDIA GeForce 9800 GT graphics, the performance of the HD 4830 is higher and, although NVIDIA's card is cheaper, ATI’s solution seems to be a better choice. The only to say otherwise is NVIDIA, which published a slide showing the superiority of its board.
Let’s take it step by step and look closer at the Radeon HD 4830 for the beginning. As most of you already know, the card is based on the RV770 core, namely the RV770LE. It features 640 stream processors, which makes it slower than HD 4850 or HD 4870. The new card also features a slower clock, 575MHz, and fewer texture units, 32 to be more precise. Even so, HD 4830 features a 57.6GB/s bandwidth and can boast 740 gigaflops.
Although it provides less performance than other Radeon 4800 cards, the HD 4830 was meant from the start to fit between the HD 4850 solution and HD 4670 in the $130 (€100) market segment. As the recent reviews show, the card is able to live up to expectations. We read four such articles that state the board’s supremacy, and looked at the slide posted by NVIDIA. You should do the same.
“The Radeon HD 4830 graphics card is another winner from AMD and an easy choice for those wanting to do more than just gaming,” say the guys from Legit Reviews after testing the card. According to them, this graphics solution allows gamers to play current game titles with image quality settings raised. The performance of the card is great considering its price.
The guys from neoseeker made a direct comparison between the Radeon HD 4830 and an MSI N9800 GT card, which came overclocked from the vendor. As test results show, the ATI card beats the 9800 GT in most cases and even proves to be a little more energy-efficient. Vantage and 3DMark06 results clearly favor HD 4830, and it is faster in several games as well. The conclusion is that the card is a great solution, although it comes at a stock core frequency.
Fudzilla performed some testing on the HD 4830 as well. Unfortunately, they only compared the results with those from a 9800 GT with the core running at 660MHz and the memory set at 950MHz. This made the stock card run slower than the factory overclocked MSI Geforce 9800 GT they compared it with, but the results were close enough to sustain the supremacy of the Radeon GPU. Moreover, HD 4830 proved faster than the 9800 GT-OC at few games. The conclusion was that we're looking at a better product.
HotHardware tested the reference design card along with a PowerColor Radeon HD 4830 card and compared the results. According to them, the reference design card is a bit slower than the 9800 GT board, while the PowerColor GPU is a bit faster. HotHardware also says that the reference card could have performed slower than expected due to some BIOS problems. After retrieving a new BIOS for the card, the ATI Radeon HD 4830 performed on-par with the PowerColor GPU.
As stated above, NVIDIA also sent word on the same results from its own testing, and said that the ATI Radeon HD 4830 GPU is easily outperformed by its GeForce 9800 GT solution. According to NVIDIA, its card is more valuable courtesy of its CUDA HPC foundation and PhysX acceleration features. The glitch is that the card they tested is one of the review samples AMD sent out on the field featuring only 560 stream processors. The HD 4830 cards on the market have 640 SPs and are said to perform around 10 percent better.
During the past few months, AMD/ATI proved to its customers that it is able to provide high-class products and that its Radeon HD 4800 lineup is an award winning high-performance series of market leading graphics cards. News generally shows the card as a great choice for the $100-$150 segment, better than the GeForce 9800 GT solution, even if NVIDIA tries to prove otherwise. Time will tell for sure whether the newly launched HD 4830 card is a valuable addition to the series or not.
