After a series of successful launches with the Radeon HD 4800 and 4600, AMD is back with a new card to fill the gap in its range between the Radeon HD 4850 and 4670. This new arrival, the Radeon HD 4830 is actually a castrated Radeon HD 4850, with a section of its calculation units deactivated and frequency reduced. It has the same design as the Radeon HD 4850.
On sale for €110, it is in direct competition with the GeForce 8800 GT / 9800 GT and according to AMD, it easily outperforms them. This should ensure dominance for Radeon across almost all market segments.
It does however seem as if AMD has messed up with the models sent out to the press. These models, or at least some of them, reportedly have only 112 Vec5 units rather than the 128 announced. The first tests then, are likely to be unreliable with the Radeon HD 4830 performing at a lower level than it should. We here at BeHardware haven’t yet had the time to carry out tests on the card. We will do so next week, hoping that AMD will have been able to clarify this problem in the meantime and supply us with an up-to-date card, should indeed the problem exist.
