Introduction

AMD's HD 4830 has been a smash hit for everyone looking for best performance per dollar. The card is based on RV770, the same GPU used on the HD 4850 and HD 4870. AMD however locked the number of shading units down from 800 to 640.

While the original HD 4830 design was essentially an HD 4850 reference PCB, add in board partners quickly came out with custom designs to reduce cost. Albatron is one of the first companies to offer an even further refined design that does not require an extra PCI-Express power connector. This means that all power is supplied to the card via PCI-Express slot which has a maximum power limit of 75W. In order to keep power consumption down, Albatron has decided to go with the stock HD 4830 reference design clocks.

Packaging

Albatron sent us the card in a nice looking, yet non-descript package. I guess the final retail version will have a more refined box that lists product name and specifications.

Contents

We received only the card without any accessories. You will probably see the usual accessories included with the retail package.

The Card

Compared to the HD 4830 reference design the PCB has been shortened quite a bit. Due to the cooler used the card requires two case slots now where the HD 4830 used only one. This shouldn't be a problem for most users anyway.


The card has one analog VGA port, one DVI port and one HDMI port. This is a very flexible output configuration that represents the segment the card is targeted at. Like on all recent ATI cards the HDMI connector includes an audio feed straight from the GPU.
For HDMI Audio, NVIDIA requires you to feed an external audio source, for example from your motherboard's on-board audio, to the card via SPDIF cable. AMD on the other hand has integrated a sound device inside their GPUs which is the easier solution for most users.


As you can see there is no dedicated CrossFire connector for this card. There might be a chance that you can run CF via the PCI-Express bus. I added a reference HD 4830 to the test system but didn't get any CrossFire option in CCC at all, maybe CF only works with two HD 4830 Greens.


Here are the front and the back of the card, high-res versions are also available (front, back). If you choose to use these images for voltmods etc, please include a link back to this site or let us post your article.