Finally an add-in board partner has managed to come out with a PCB that runs the 956 million transistor RV770 GPU with all its 800 stream processors enabled, completely on PCI-Express slot power. It does away with the 6-pin PCI-E power connector. This is the main "green" feature of this card jumping the increasingly popular energy conservation bandwagon, offering near-reference features and performance, at a reduced power draw. Actually the power draw is only reduced under load, in idle we see a few Watts more power draw than a 640 SP HD 4830 reference design.
This card is another instance where partners are choosing to enable all the 800 stream processors for the RV770 GPU, against 640 that should be enabled for the HD 4830, as far as specifications go. While the first such cards were called a "glitch" by the community, more and more people now believe that this is a deliberate move by VGA card manufacturers to add a little extra power to their HD 4830 designs. In our testing we saw the HD 4830 Green trump the HD 4830 reference at the same clock speed thanks to the additional shaders. Overall that performance increase is in the 2-3% region which is less than I expected personally.
Albatron's card provides playable frame rates for any of today's games at resolutions up to 1680x1050. Some games however require you to ease the settings a bit, which shouldn't matter much considering you only spent $100 for the graphics card. Thanks to the efficient design, the card does extremely well in our power consumption charts, finding competition only in the HD 4670. A fine look at the power consumption chart however reveals that the HD 4830 Green exceeds the 75W the PCI-Express slot offers according to the standard. Such a small increase did not affect system stability in any way and it will not affect you either. Even with about 9% overclock the card ran perfectly stable without any warnings or issues.
The only thing that you should really worry about is the fan noise. Albatron did not implement any temperature based fan control mechanism which means the card will whine equally in idle and load. Definitely a no-no if you plan on watching movies via the card's integrated HDMI port. Should you however not care about fan noise or know how to handle a soldering iron, this shouldn't be a deal breaker.
While it is not the cheapest HD 4830, the Albatron HD 4830 is not the most expensive one either. I also think that over time its price will move more towards $90 in order to compete better with other offerings in this market segment.