AMD officially releases Radeon HD 4830
AMD has officially presented the Radeon HD 4830. The card fills the gap between the Radeon HD 4850 and the HD 4670 and should mainly compete with the Geforce 9800GT from Nvidia.
AMD has served the upper end of the mainstream market with the Radeon HD 4850 and the 4870, while for the lower end the HD 4670 has been released. However, there is a gap between the 4850’s 1 teraflops and the 480 gigaflops provided by the 4670, and the Radeon HD 4830 has to fill that with its 740 gigaflops. Also the suggested retail price of the card, which is between 100 and 150 dollars, is somewhere between 175 dollars of the 4850 and 80 dollars of the 4670. In Europe, the price will initially be around 110 euros, AMD expects. .
The AMD reference card features 512MB gddr3 memory running at 1800MHz, and the memory bandwidth is 57.6GBps. The core of the GPU is clocked at 575MHz and there are 640 stream processors on board. According to AMD, the Geforce 9800GT from Nvidia, introduced in July, is the biggest competitor for the 4830.
The reviews show that the card is a welcome new player in the mainstream market. In most games, the card performs better than the 9800GT, but the difference is not great. With support for Directx 10.1 and eight-channel lpcm over HDMI, the Radeon has a slight advantage, but the Geforce also has strong trump cards with Cuda and Physx. The fact that the 9800GT is nothing more than an 8800GT fired at 55nm means that AMD’s victory cannot be called spectacular.