Legit Reviews

AMD has done a great job bringing the Radeon HD 4000 series to market and they now offer a product at every price point available and the offerings are impressive. The AMD Radeon HD 4830 was found to be a solid performing graphics card that was able to play current game titles at decent resolutions with many image quality settings cranked up. How can you complain with the performance numbers on the Radeon HD 4830 when the price point is only $129?

GI-JOE wrote:Good article. Although I would have liked to see how it compared to a 8800GT too!

Gomeler wrote:HD4850 with some of the stream processors disabled. Not too shabby, might want to check the vGPU to see if they are undervolting it to reduce power consumption. I imagine those cards could easily go to 800-900MHz with a flick of the soldering iron

Some of you may know (but only a few of you may actually care) that today marks the release of ATI's HD 4830 which is supposed to compete directly with the 9800 GT errrr.... 8800 GT 512MB.

Unfortuantely, the folks over at Techpowerup have learned that there seems to have been a serious problem with the review samples ATI sent out to numerous review sites. Basically, it seems that somewhere wires were crossed and cards have been shipping with 560 Shaders versus the specified 640.

The odd thing is that some cards have the nominal 640 shaders while others are gimped. This results in an approximate 10% performance difference between the two cards and unfortunately puts some serious questions behind all of the HD 4830 reviews that have been posted. Were the reviewers using the "proper" card with 640 shaders or the one with the incorrect shader count? In this Hardware Canucks stands behind Techpowerup in asking that all review sites publish which card they used for their benchmarks.

Even more unfortunately, this casts some serious doubt upon the cards currently making their way to the retail channels. The consumer has NO WAY of knowing if or how many 560 shader equipped cards made it to ATI's board partners. This means that any number of HD 4830s could be underperforming without the customer realizing it.

Will this mean a recall of the cards? If not, will ATI release a statement? One way or another, this little slip-up puts some serious doubt upon the launch of this card. Hopefully, the launch will be trouble free after this speedbump but until things are put to bed with this situation...buyer beware.

Unfortunately, UPS still has posession of our card so we can't verify this for ourselves. Long story folks, don't ask...

You can find all of W1zzard's investigation HERE and I encourage all of you to read through it. That is what good journalism is all about folks!!

martini161 wrote:

Gomeler wrote:HD4850 with some of the stream processors disabled. Not too shabby, might want to check the vGPU to see if they are undervolting it to reduce power consumption. I imagine those cards could easily go to 800-900MHz with a flick of the soldering iron

i like the way you think

GI-JOE wrote:Good article. Although I would have liked to see how it compared to a 8800GT too!

"AMD has identified that a very limited number of ATI Radeon™ HD 4830 boards have shipped with an incorrect BIOS which may impact performance. This is in no way hardware related, and an updated BIOS fully resolves the performance limitation. AMD has provided its board partners with the updated BIOS. Please contact your board manufacturer for instructions on updating the card BIOS."

Apoptosis wrote:It seems that this card had a BIOS on it that disabled one of the SIMDs in the core, which means that is was only running on 7 SIMDs. By doing a BIOS flash the other SIMD is enabled and all 640 stream processors can be used for rendering and so forth.

Here is a statement from AMD:

"AMD has identified that a very limited number of ATI Radeon™ HD 4830 boards have shipped with an incorrect BIOS which may impact performance. This is in no way hardware related, and an updated BIOS fully resolves the performance limitation. AMD has provided its board partners with the updated BIOS. Please contact your board manufacturer for instructions on updating the card BIOS."

It also seems that most cards on the market have the right BIOS and that mostly just review sites are impacted. With so many reviews in the works, we won't be going back and updating all the numbers on this one. If you have a card and need to update the bios you can grab the BIOS here - http://www.techpowerup.com/vgabios/2561 ... 81023.html

geokilla wrote:You might wanna add that part into the review Apop, just so other readers can know what's going on and why there's such a "big" performance difference with your results compared to other sites.