Some Radeon HD 4830s have missing stream processors

Posted at: 3:36pm 27th October 2008 by Ben Hardwidge

A few HiS cards don’t have all 640 stream processors enabled, but there’s a BIOS fix

ATI’s Radeon HD 4830 is supposed to have fewer stream processors than the 4850, but it turns out that some 4830 cards have just 560 stream processors enabled, rather than the full 640.

According to AMD, the majority of the affected cards were pre-production cards meant for reviews in the media. However, AMD also informed us that ‘a very limited number of ATI Radeon HD 4830 boards were released to market with the same pre-production BIOS.’ The company claims that the affected cards are all made by HiS, and claims that it has determined ‘with a high degree of certainty’ that ‘fewer than 400’ cards have been released to retailers with the problem.

The HiS card is currently available from MicroDirect for £89.98 inc VAT, with stock expected in a week, and it’s currently the cheapest Radeon HD 4830 card we’ve seen in the UK. Thankfully, the problem can be fixed by a BIOS update, so don’t worry if you’ve already ordered an HiS Radeon HD 4830 card.

If you have such a card, then run GPU-Z on your machine, and check the number in the Shaders box. If fewer than 640 stream processors are detected, then you’ll need a BIOS update. You can download the BIOS fix from here, and you just need to unzip the HD4830_SJ3G01.ZIP file into a folder, run the included SJ3G01_00R_01.exe file and then reboot your PC.