Oh, a show down for the ages. N9800GT is going for like $105 bones today, whereas the challenger, today's HD 4830, has a the best bits of the HD 4800 series for a $130.

Who will prevail?

http://www.neoseeker.com/Articles/Hardware/Reviews/msi9800gt/

For the record: This article was changed the day after publication for the following reason: the card we had only had 560 shaders, whereas the retail cards have 640. You can read more about this here ( http://www.neoseeker.com/news/9071-many-review-samples-of-the-hd-4830-missing-shaders/ )

In the first review, the HD 4830 was about 10% slower, so I declared the N9800GT the winner of the battle, and gave it the recommended award.

In the revision -- now with graphs showing the regular retail card's performance -- the two cards balanced out, so I declared the battle a draw and retracted the Recommended award given to the MSI N9800GT.

This message was edited by kspiess on Oct 24 2008.

I think that the 512mb 4850 will be discontinued, to be replaced with a 1gb model, and the same will happen to the 4870. The 4830 will then replace the 4850 as the best "bang for your buck" model in the line up.
All this info comes from deciphering AMD marketing material, as it never mentions 512mb cards at all.

To be honest, I think the 4830 will win. I'm getting one, it runs games just as well as the 9800 GT, and in some games beats it by a few frames, and in some lose by a few. I'm going to be gaming on it on 1280x1024, and based on the benches I've seen, it'll get 40-70 on most of today's graphically demanding games. (Crysis Warhead, Devil May Cry 4, Mass Effect etc.)

If you look at the price differences, I think you'll often to be able to get the HD 4850 for only like $10 or $20 more than the HD 4830, so it'll be worth it.

HOWEVER I expect that some good versions of the HD 4830 will come out with superior coolers -- in which case, you'll be able to run a HD 4830 overclocked as to the same speeds of a HD 4850, in which case then, the HD 4830 would be a better deal.

I thought this MSI N9800GT going for like $105 is a pretty darn good deal -- though I think prices are going to shake up pretty soon; like even by next week...

quote Hellfire29

I think that the 512mb 4850 will be discontinued, to be replaced with a 1gb model, and the same will happen to the 4870. The 4830 will then replace the 4850 as the best "bang for your buck" model in the line up.
All this info comes from deciphering AMD marketing material, as it never mentions 512mb cards at all.

I think there is a good chance you are right, but really going from 512MB to 1GB isn't that big of a deal , unless you have an amazing monitor and can game at extreme resolutions (2048x1536 etc)