Final thoughts and rating
By introducing the Radeon HD 4830 512MB, AMD and its partners have plugged the all-important £80-£100 sector with an up-to-date graphics card that competes favourably against previous-generation GPUs and NVIDIA's current preferred offering, GeForce 9800 GT 512MB.The process by which AMD has achieved an etail price of around £90 lies with the simple economics of using GPUs that don't quite make the Radeon HD 4850 grade - why derivate all the way down to Radeon HD 4670 when you don't have to.
HEXUS' benchmark appraisal has shown that the new GPU benchmarks at around 80-85 per cent of the HD 4850 and that reduction in performance is compensated for by a street price which is just where it should be: below £100.
There's nothing new that we haven't seen before, of course, but there's also little we can take away from a GPU that will provide smooth gaming at 1,680x1,050 in the majority of titles.
NVIDIA's GeForce 9800 GT still remains a viable competitor due to its keen pricing and extended software infrastructure that includes CUDA and PhysX, but the better pure gaming card is, on balance, the Radeon HD 4830.
Bottom line: an expected derivation of HD 4850 that brings excellent performance at a slightly lower budget. Got £100 to spend on your next graphics-card upgrade? You'd be prudent to put an HD 4830 512MB on your shortlist. We now wait for partners to release their non-reference versions with bated breath.
The good
Excellent gaming performance for under £100
Multimedia feature-set remains strong
Competitive idle and load power-draw figures
Sample overclocked well
The not so good
NVIDIA offers its customers more than just a GPU - CUDA and PhysX are value-adding extras that AMD does not have
Radeon HD 4850s continue to drop in price, limiting the scope of partners to customise HD 4830 designs before they become performance-uncompetitive.
HEXUS Rating
HEXUS scores products out of a possible 10. A score for an average-rated product, therefore, is a meaningful ‘5’, and not ‘9/10’, which is common practice for a great many other publications.
We consider any product score above '5' as a safe buy. The
higher the score, the higher the recommendation from HEXUS to buy.
Simple, straightforward buying advice.
AMD (ATI) Radeon HD 4830 512MB
HEXUS Where2Buy
TBC
HEXUS Right2Reply
At HEXUS.net, we invite the companies whose products we test to comment on our articles. If any AMD representatives choose to respond, we'll publish their commentary here verbatim.
