MusicRadar Verdict
AMD needs to sort itself out and price its cards more sensibly. As it is, this card is outdone by the competition on price and performance
Pros
- +
Decent performance
Cons
- -
Prices needs lowering. Disappointing benchmarks
MusicRadar's got your back Our team of expert musicians and producers spends hours testing products to help you choose the best music-making gear for you. Find out more about how we test.
And it was all going so well for ATI. Choosing to concentrate on mid-range graphics cards and letting Nvidia run off with the monolithic chip design seemed to be paying off - the HD4850 competed with Nvidia's mid-range cards and the dual-GPU 4870X2 went for the high-end jugular. But this 'budget' 4830 feels like a slip up.
AMD is trying to position its new card around the lower end but, at £90, describing the 4830 as a budget card is like trying to pass a rabid, two-legged poodle off as a pedigree dog.
It's only about £20 less than the far more fully-featured 4850. So yes, it is less expensive, but in terms of performance it just can't compete with its stablemates or Nvidia's spread of mid-range cards. The results were, disappointingly, pretty much half those of a 4850 - a card already competing with Nvidia's even cheaper 9600GT.
"It’s a piece of music software history": ReCycle gets recycled as Reason Studios makes the classic sample editor available as a free download
“The verse tricks you into thinking that it’s in a certain key and has this ‘simplistic’ musical language, but then it flips”: Charli XCX’s Brat collaborator Jon Shave on how they created Sympathy Is A Knife
“I’ve seen a million faces and I’ve rocked them all!”: Was Bon Jovi’s 1989 acoustic performance really the inspiration for MTV Unplugged?
