Radeon HD 4830 with less shader units

AMD's Radeon HD 4830 has made it to the news several times recently. Earlier, images of the card by Sapphire, MSI and PowerColor were released. The RV770 LE, as the chip is called the Radeon HD 4830 is based on, features 640 shader units. AMD has shipped multiple pre-production samples with a modded BIOS to manufacturers. This BIOS will make the card utilize only 560 of its 640 shader processors. It's rumored that some Radeon HD 4830 graphics cards with 560 shader processors have found their way to the retail market. It would concern less than 400 graphics cards with a wrong BIOS-version, all cards are from manufacturer HIS.

According to AMD, these graphics cards are certainly not meant to be distributed, the Radeon HD 4830 is supposed to have 640 shader units. They report that the problem is easily solved by updating to the correct BIOS-version, this will make the cards use all of their 640 shaders again. AMD advises all 4830 users to check their graphics card with the tool GPU-Z. In case the card shows up with less than 640 shader processors, the consumer can download the correct BIOS and further instructions from HIS.

Tags: radeon

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