AMD's ATI Radeon Runs into Trouble

AMD's ATI Radeon Runs into Trouble

Kunal Gangar, Oct 27, 2008 1141 hrs IST

Some HD 4830 GPUs came with less streaming processors

It's just been a few days of launch and AMD's ATI Radeon HD 4830 GPU has run into problems. Apparently, some units of the graphics card sent out by their partner, HIS was adjusted to run with a pre-production version of BIOS. Older BIOS meant that the streaming processors were disabled to 560 instead of specified 640 which restricted the full potential of the card.

However, the good news is that AMD has identified the issue and claims that around 400 units of HIS boards are affected by this problem which can be easily resolved by a BIOS update.

"AMD has identified that, in addition to reference samples of the ATI Radeon HD 4830 boards sent to media with a pre-production BIOS potentially impacting the card's performance, a very limited number of ATI Radeon HD 4830 boards were released to market with the same pre-production BIOS. This is in no way hardware related, and an updated BIOS fully resolves the performance limitation."

Through consultations with AMD board partners, it has been determined with a high degree of certainty that fewer than 400 ATI Radeon HD 4830 boards from one AMD board partner, HIS, have reached the market with the pre-production BIOS incorrectly provided by AMD. As only a small number of HIS-branded ATI Radeon HD 4830 cards are impacted, we ask any customers that purchased an HIS-branded ATI Radeon HD 4830 to test the board using the GPU-Z utility (available at Techpowerup.com ). If the GPU-Z utility reports fewer than 640 shaders, please visit the HIS website for information on how to update the card BIOS via a downloadable install utility."

Source: Bit-Tech