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| Introduction and Specifications | ||||||
Since the RV770 GPU's initial arrival, we have seen the technology used in the GPU migrate up and down AMD's product stack. At first, the RV770 powered only the ATI Radeon HD 4850 and 4870, but soon thereafter two RV770's were linked together to form the current flagship Radeon HD 4870 X2. Then the GPU was scaled down to bring out the Radeon HD 4600, 4500, and 4300 series of products. Ultimately, AMD ended up with competitive offerings at virtually every price point, ranging from $39 on up, to over $550 for the flagship product. But there is an approximate $80 price gap between the $160-ish Radeon HD 4850 and the roughly $80 Radeon HD 4670, that AMD plans to fill today with the release of the Radeon HD 4830.
As the above list of specifications and features show, the new Radeon HD 4830 has essentially the exact same features as the other cards in the Radeon HD 4800 series. The Radeon HD 4830 offers DX10.1 and Shader Model 4.1 support, AVIVO HD, HDMI with audio, etc. These GPUs are manufactured on TSMC's 55nm process node and the cards support ATI's CrossFireX multi-GPU technology. Since we've covered essentially all of the shared features of the Radeon HD 4800 series cards before, we won't go into them in depth again here. However, we would recommend taking a look at a few of our recent articles to brush up on the tech, if you're so inclined.
Reading the articles above will lay the groundwork for much of what we'll be showing you on the pages ahead. Because the new Radeon HD 4830 shares the same GPU as the other cards in the Radeon HD 4800 series, with some elements disabled, they have the same feature set and capabilities but differentiate in terms of performance. |
| A Closer Look At The Cards |
To illustrate exactly how the new Radeon HD 4830 differs from the Radeon HD 4850 and HD 4870 that preceded it in terms of specifications, we've got a simple chart that outlines the main differences between the cards.
As you can see, the Radeon HD 4830 differs from its 4800 series counterparts only in its number of stream processors, texture units, and clock speeds. Two of the RV770 GPU's 10 SIMD arrays and associated texture units have been disabled, which results in a total of 640 active stream processors--down from 800 in the Radeon HD 4850. The Radeon HD 4830's core clock has also been lowered a bit, to 575MHz. The result is less compute performance and fillrate. Memory bandwidth is down as well, but that's only because of a clock speed reduction, as the Radeon HD 4830 has the same memory bus width. Another interesting aspect of the list above is max board power. AMD is rating the cards at a maximum of 110W, just like the 4850. Convention wisdom suggests power consumption would be lower, but AMD is being conservative here because they are binning more chips from a die and may need to goose the voltage on some of them to reach the desired specs.
There's nothing much new to see here physically. AMD's reference ATI Radeon HD 4830 looks exactly like a Radeon HD 4850. We were informed, however, that most board partners would be offering non-reference Radeon HD 4830s that use different PCBs, coolers, memory, etc. And that seems to be true as evidenced below...
The PowerColor Radeon HD 4830 is completely different from AMD's reference design. The card has a shorter PCB (by about an inch), custom dual-slot cooling, and a unique assortment of outputs. In lieu of a TV output and second DVI connector, this card sports an analog DB15 VGA connector and a DisplayPort. Also, remember that these cards support HDMI output with audio when used with the correct DVI-to-HDMI dongle. The specifications on PowerColor's offering are identical to the reference design with a 575MHz core clock and 512MB of 900MHz GDDR3 memory. PowerColor's cooler, however, performed better. Whereas the reference card would peak with an approximate 82'C GPU temp under load, the PowerColor Radeon HD 4830 never broke 76'C. Both remained very quiet during testing.
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| Test Systems and 3DMark06 | ||||||||||||
HOW WE CONFIGURED THE TEST SYSTEMS: We tested all of the graphics cards used in this article on either an Asus nForce 790i SLI Ultra based Striker II Extreme motherboard (NVIDIA GPUs) or an X48 based Asus P5E3 Premium (ATI GPUs) powered by a Core 2 Extreme QX6850 quad-core processor and 2GB of low-latency Corsair RAM. The first thing we did when configuring these test systems was enter their respective BIOSes and set all values to their "optimized" or "high performance" default settings. Then we manually configured the memory timings and disabled any integrated peripherals that wouldn't be put to use. The hard drive was then formatted, and Windows Vista Ultimate was installed. When the installation was complete we fully updated the OS, and installed the latest DX10 redist and various hotfixes, along with the necessary drivers and applications.
A quick note about our benchmark results before we go any further. We've included Radeon HD 4830 CrossFire scores for reference, but please note that there are no other dual-GPU configurations listed. We've included the CrossFire scores because we know many of you would be interested in how a pair of these affordable cards stackes up. The results from 3DMark06's individual sub-tests mirror the overall result. The Radeon HD 4830 falls in between the 4670 and 4850. |
| 3Dmark Vantage | ||||||
The 3DMark Vantage overall score, as reported by the "Performance" preset, essentially mirror those from 3DMark06 on the previous page, albeit with wider performance deltas. The trend remains the same.
3DMark Vantage's individual GPU tests show a similar trend the overall result above and to each other, with the Radeon HD 4830 falling in between the 4670 and 4850. |
| Half Life 2: Episode 2 | ||||||
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The Radeon HD 4830 performed very well in our custom Half Life 2 benchmark. The performance trend we've seen on the preceding pages essentially played out again, but for a card of this type, the framerates are quite good. |
| Unreal Tournament 3 | ||||||
The Radeon HD 4830 put up good numbers in our custom UT3 benchmark as well. The previous performance trend remained the same, but the framerates were again very good for a card in this market segment. |
| Enemy Territory: Quake Wars | ||||||
In our custom Enemy Territory Quake Wars benchmark, the Radeon HD 4830 performed very well, hanging with the Radeon HD 4850 and GeForce 9800, and easily surpassing the HD 4670 and 9600 GT. |
| Crysis Performance | ||||||
The Radeon HD 4830 was a strong performer in Crysis as well. The Radeon HD 4850 pulled away by a more significant margin that we saw in some other tests, and CrossFire didn't seem to scale properly, but the 4830 broke the 60FPS mark at 1280 with medium settings. |
| SD and HD Video Performance | ||||
We also did some quick testing of the new Radeon HD 4830's video processing engine, in terms of both image quality and CPU utilization with some standard and high-definition video playback tests.
HQV is comprised of a sampling of SD video clips and test patterns that have been specifically designed to evaluate a variety of interlaced video signal processing tasks, including decoding, de-interlacing, motion correction, noise reduction, film cadence detection, and detail enhancement. As each clip is played, the viewer is required to "score" the image based on a predetermined set of criteria. The numbers listed below are the sum of the scores for each section. We played the HQV DVD using the latest version of Cyberlink's PowerDVD HD, with hardware acceleration for AMD AVIVO HD and NVIDIA PureVideo HD extensions enabled.
Both ATI's and NVIDIA's latest GPUs have no trouble with SD video playback. All three of the cards put up near perfect scores in the HQV test. In case you're not familiar with HQV, 130 points is the maximum score attainable. At 128 points, a PC equipped with any of these graphics cards plays back DVD video at quality levels better than the vast majority of set-top DVD players on the market.
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| Total System Power Consumption | ||||
We'd like to cover a few final data points before bringing this article to a close. Throughout all of our benchmarking and testing, we monitored how much power our test systems were consuming using a power meter. Our goal was to give you an idea as to how much power each configuration used while idling and under a heavy workload. Please keep in mind that we were testing total system power consumption at the outlet here, not just the power being drawn by the motherboards alone.
Although AMD rates the ATI Radeon HD 4830 with the same max board power as the HD 4850 (110W), our particular sample consumed less power at both idle and under load. AMD noted this may not be the case with every HD 4830 though, so be aware there will be differences from card to card. |
| Our Summary and Conclusion | ||||
Performance Summary: The new ATI Radeon HD 4830 performed right in line with its position in the market--the card was clearly faster than the more affordable Radeon HD 4670 and a bit slower than the pricer Radeon HD 4850. In comparison to NVIDIA's offerings, the 4830 is typically faster than the GeForce 9600 and about on par with or somewhat slower than a GeForce 9800 GT. In comparing the reference card to PowerColor's, even though they shared the same specifications, the PowerColor Radeon HD 4830, was usually a bit faster than the reference card, probably due to slight tweaks associated with the shorter board design.
With an expected street price of around $129 (some boards are already available for $119 after mail in rebates), the Radeon HD 4830 seems to be a solid product. If you want an affordable, no compromise graphics solution that can handle all of today's games and virtually any video decoding task, the Radeon HD 4830 should fit the bill nicely. Be aware, however, that the sub-$150 graphics card space is loaded, perhaps overloaded, with worthwhile products currently, so you could save a few bucks and get something with only slightly lower performance or spent just a few dollars more and get something faster. In a few weeks / months time, as older models undergo further price cuts or disappear from shelves altogether, there should be cleared differentiation in the market. So for now, just be extra diligent when shopping to ensure you're getting the best deal. If you don't feel like comparison shopping though, and the Radeon HD 4830's price is right, we doubt anyone would be disappointed in this card. The Radeon HD 4830 represents a great value for the money.
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