AMD Radeon HD 4830 Graphics Card Follow-Up

[Apoptosis]

Shortly after Legit Reviews published our Radeon HD 4830 articles we were notified by AMD that every reference card they sent out to reviews came with an incorrect BIOS. The BIOS that shipped on the Radeon HD 4830 had one too many of the SIMDS disabled and that the Radeon HD 4830 had just 560 stream processors enabled instead of the 640 stream processors that it should have been running. Read on to see what the right BIOS does for performance!



Article Title: AMD Radeon HD 4830 Graphics Card Follow-Up
Article URL: http://www.legitreviews.com/article/818/1/

[DX]

Wow I bet some one was chewed out for that one.

[geokilla]

If it's soft modded from a basic 4850 into a 4830, could doing a BIOS flash upgrade the 4830 to a 4850?

[Apoptosis]

If it's soft modded from a basic 4850 into a 4830, could doing a BIOS flash upgrade the 4830 to a 4850?

I've heard of some people trying with failure.

[geokilla]

If it's soft modded from a basic 4850 into a 4830, could doing a BIOS flash upgrade the 4830 to a 4850?

I've heard of some people trying with failure.

Hmmm. Well it might be only a matter of time before hackers and crackers find a way to do that...

[GI-JOE]

More than likely, do you think that the 4830 might be a lower bin compared to the 4850? And thus the failures to flash it to 4850 speeds/bios?

[DX]

would make sense till they run out of the low binned chips. I seem to remember something like that happening with Intel cpus where they had run out of the low binned chips and people were overclocking the low end chips to hell and back getting 100% overclocks IRC.

[Apoptosis]

More than likely, do you think that the 4830 might be a lower bin compared to the 4850? And thus the failures to flash it to 4850 speeds/bios?

yes, I fully believe the Radeon HD 4830 is nothing more than a Radeon HD 4850 that failed tested and uses memory chips that are lower clocked or also didn't pass bin testing. It's the same core and the same PCB as the Radeon HD 4850, so this is 100% logical.

[gwolfman]

Thanks for the update and keeping the facts straight. I was leaning towards the 9600 GT but now it looks like the 4830 is quite a bit better. Hmm....

[Gomeler]

The HD4850 features the full RV770 core with all 10 SIMD cores enabled giving a full 800 Stream Processors. HD4830 was supposed to have 8 SIMD cores enabled for a total of 640 Stream processors. However somehow a BIOS was programed to the cards that further reduced the amount of SIMD cores to 7 cores for a total of 560 stream processors. The two proper SIMD cores are disabled supposedly on package while one SIMD core was disabled via BIOS. Therefore if you attempt to flash a BIOS telling the card it has a full 10 cores while it really only has 8 cores available would cause you to brick the card.

I imagine all these "broken" RV770s have been saved up over the last few months and now AMD is cashing in on these otherwise useless cores.