Thoughts and Conclusion
The gamer on a budget is a market segment often ignored by hardware review sites. Being a reviewer for any length of time means you get accustomed to seeing the latest and greatest hardware all the time, and it gets easy to lose track of the cost. Being a gamer doesn’t automatically equate to having lots of money, and finding good hardware for the money is never more important than when you’re scraping up every last penny. Sapphire has recognized this, and has teamed up with ATI to bring us an aggressively-priced card that delivers solid performance for the money. The Radeon HD 4830 is a solid addition to an already outstanding lineup, and for $119.99 + S&H (directron.com), this is the card to beat for the budget-conscious gamer.
Actually the 128bit memory interface can indeed compete with one using a 256bit interface depending upon many other factors like overall bandwidth, GPU power, memory type and amount.
I find it hard to believe that a card with a 128bit memory interface can compete with one with 256bit.
Actually, from what I can find, the 4770 ranges from $99-109, whereas the 4830 ranges from $74-109. The 4830 may not be in the same bracket now as when it was released, but it’s still got good bang for the buck.
its difficult to see why you’ve recommended this card, when a 4770 will outperform this one in all benchmarks, and is 10 $ cheaper at the very least.