Hey Jian, I see that you deliberately left out the update that Anand had at the top of that review. Nicely done, bravo idiotic fanboi.

Here it is for those interested:

"Update: AMD has confirmed to us that there were some issues with the BIOS on our sample board. Rather than 2 disabled SIMD units, our review sample 4830 had 3 disabled SIMD units. AMD has assured us that no retail boards will be affected and this is only a problem that affected reference boards built as review samples. We are working on resolving the issue with our review sample and will complete updated tests as soon as we can. This will affect our performance results, but until we run the tests we can't be sure how much more performance we will get out of retail 4830 hardware."



Meant 4870 levels, typo.

For me, even at the same price I trust the nvidia drivers more. I have a HD3850 agp and AMD/ATI never supported the card with their updated drivers, Oblivion and and Secondlife would not play.

This 4830 baby is capable of overclocking to HD4830 levels, not bad at all!

why they never put in there a price/performance index?

So it's $10 cheaper (at newegg...yeah, some people check your statements...LOL) and you can get Overclocked editions for that price so I'm not sure your statements hold water. Witness Anand's article:
Age of Conan: TIE, exactly that is.
Crysis:1024x768 win 9800GT, above win for 4830 (about 10% each way)
Oblivion: NVIDIA Domination (20%)
ETQW:AMD Domination (20-25% dep. res)
RaceDriver: AMD Domination (19% or so)
Assassins Creed: AMD win 3% or so
Witcher : AMD win 8%

So if you calculate what the OC edition of 9800GT gets you (another 10%) it becomes the better card in all but 2 maybe. Also calculate that it runs 40watts more than the 9800GT at load and another 17watt idle and you've got a yearly electric bill of around $26. Since these types of people own a card for a few years, buying the 4830 will cost them an extra $78 for 3yrs+$10 up front since it costs more than 9800GT OC editions running $99.

So 9800GT is king. If you own your card 3 years you're saving roughly $88 netting your 9800GT OC Edition for almost $10...LOL. Oh, and it then whens 5 out of the 7 games above. Oh yeah, you get another 10% from Nvidia's drivers they just dropped on us (and 30% in some) and I quote YOU "Nvidia boasts gains of over 30 per cent in games like Far Cry 2, at 1680 x 1050 with 4x AA and 16x AF on a Geforce 9800 GTX+ and the new driver. But apparently most other games only see a pretty conservative, non earth shattering 10 per cent performance improvement.". 
http://www.theinquirer.net/gb/inquirer/news/2008/10/22/nvidia-launches-big-bang-ii


So I guess 9800GT OC really kicks 4830's A$$ now eh? Is that a 7 for 7 victory now? Note anandtech used the older 1.78 drivers, not the big bag II drivers that give 10-30% more performance on a 9800GTX+. 

It takes a 3yr to get your free card from the electric bills, but it's still free, and you're faster in everything with Big Bang II drivers...Where's Charlie...LOL.

234 bc - 2005 ad, oops sorry, couldn't help myself. So anyway, the 4830, the lesser brother of the 4850. For some reason I can get a 4850 for 1195 NOK at one our most popular etailers yet the 4830 costs 1249 NOK.

The logic eludes me.