The Radeon HD 4830 is based on the same technology as the Radeon HD 4870 and 4850. The only difference is in terms of the clocks, revised downwards on this model. When you look at the NVIDIA cards, this one can be compared to the GeForce 9800 GTX+ (=GTS 250). The ATI model does pretty well out of the comparison when the texturing filters are activated. Whatever screen is used, both cards are more or less equal, one in front of the other depending on the game. The NVIDIA card is however much better than the Radeon when the filters are disactivated.


All games that came out in 2008 do ok with the card and it shouldn’t have any major problem with those that come out in 2009, at least if you use a small enough screen (up to 19 inches, 5/4). And if for you, graphics quality is really crucial, and you don’t envisage reducing the graphics options, you’d be better off with another more powerful model. The same goes for those of you who have a large or medium sized screen (20 inches up): when filters are activated, the card is sometimes not sufficient for some particularly demanding games.

Size, energy consumption and noise

At 21 cm, the card is of average size. It shouldn’t be difficult to integrate into your casing then, even if it’s a fairly small one. One single PCI-Express power supply is all that’s needed to plug the card in. Power consumption at rest is excellent at 108 watts. With intense 3D activated, the result is also good at 252 watts on our counter. As our test model does not use a generic cooling system (see inset), we can’t make any remarks on this.