AMD admits some Radeon 4830 cards have missing stream processors

Last week AMD rolled out the ATI Radeon HD 4830, a sub-$130 card that competes favorably against other previous and current generation GPUs in the all-important budget sector. The launch did not go without its hiccups, it seems, as it turns out that some of the cards were shipped with only 560 of their advertised 640 stream processors enabled.

According to AMD, the affected cards were pre-production cards meant for reviews in the media. The graphics firm also said that a “very limited” number of 4830 boards (supposedly around 400) were released to market with the same pre-production BIOS, all of which were manufactured by HiS. Thankfully, the problem can be fixed via a BIOS update.

Those who already bought a HiS Radeon HD 4830 card should get it tested using GPU-Z, and if it turns out that less than 640 stream processors actually are detected, then users should go to HiS’ website for information on how to update the card BIOS via a downloadable install utility.