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It's pretty easy to picture the HD 4830 in your mind's eye. Just imagine a HD 4850. Got it? Okay, now image a sticker on it saying 'HD 4830.'

Yes -- they are pretty much the same. No surprise here. The HD 4850 and HD 4830 are basically co-joined twins, separated at birth. However, as said last page, expect different board partners to be introducing all sorts of novel designs and coolers for this card. Today's review sample HD 4830 from ATI is vanilla of a design of the HD 4830 as we will likely be seeing.

For those of you that are unfamiliar with the HD 4850, we have a single-slot cooler design; the card is roughly the same length as a 8800GT at 9.5”. The cooler is effective: we have a base layer of copper cooled by a high RPM, small fan that can push a great deal of air. Where the HD4850 fan was often forced to work at high power levels to cool that excessively hot card, the HD 4830, clocked lower, shouldn't have this problem at all, making the stock cooler completely adequate for the job.

The RV770LE GPU has just under a billion transistors (956M) packed onto a 55nm die, allowing for the capability to sustain about 740 GigaFLOPS. Though lacking the cutting-edge GDDR5 found on the HD 4870, the HD 4830's GPU is tied to capable 512MB of GDDR3 with a 256-bit memory interface. A 256-bit memory interface is uncommon for a card selling for around the $129 mark -- for this, you can thank the economies of scale, and the production capability of ATI following the success of the HD 4850.

HD 4800 family photo...

Let's take a look at some of the specs of the HD 4800's :

(Please keep in mind that prices for the HD 4850 and HD 4870 are fairly rough averages. There are some great deals out there, folks.)

ATI has told us that the HD 4830 will only be offered in 512MB configurations.

As with the the other members of the HD 4800 family, the HD 4830 comes with a whole host of features, including: support for DirectX 10.1 and Shader Model 4.0, PCI Express 2.0, ability to be setup in a CrossFireX configuration, and as we've seen with other HD 4800's, this generation has relatively better ability to handle anti-aliasing (up to a maximum of 24x CFAA.)

Besides gaming, the HD 4830 will have you covered for high definition video playback with the Unified Video Decoder 2 engine, which offloads decoding from your CPU onto your GPU. The HD 4830 is capable of HDMI with 7.1 stereo sound support as well.