[TPU] Sapphire HD 4730 512 MB Review - Overclock.net

sodaholic134 · 06-30-09

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AMD's new 40-nm Radeon HD 4770 was a great success, maybe more successful than many people expected. Together with the limited availability due to yield problems at TSMC there were very few HD 4770 cards available on the market and those sold quickly. To counter this shortage, AMD has created the HD 4730 SKU. It is based on the RV770 which powers the HD 48xx Series, yet is heavily reduced in features. For example the number of shaders has been lowered to 640 (like on the HD 4830). The memory bus width has been cut down to 128-bit, but GDDR5 memory chips are used which effectively gives the card the same bandwidth as a 256 bit GDDR3 based HD 4830. Reducing the memory bus width to 128 bit has more implications. Due to the design of the memory controller the number of ROPs has been halved to 8 as well.
Please note the considerably higher core clock of the HD 4730 compared to other cards like the HD 4850 or even HD 4870.

Sapphire is one of two AIBs who are making the HD 4730 at this time, PowerColor is the second. As I am told by Sapphire the "HD 4730 GPU chips have to be ordered specifically at AMD". This means that AIBs are not just using their excess HD 4830 GPUs on these boards. It could still mean that AMD ships their excess HD 4830 GPUs as HD 4730 GPUs to AIBs. Whether any different binning is used is not known.

When the card was first announced Sapphire told us that there won't be any review samples, so I went out and bought a retail card here in Germany which has surprisingly good stock of the Sapphire HD 4730.

SOURCE

I think I'll wait for the 4790.

videoman5 · 06-30-09

So, can one crossfire a 4730 with a 4830?

el gappo · 06-30-09

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Originally Posted by videoman5

So, can one crossfire a 4730 with a 4830?

no i dont think so, you could xfire a 4770 and 4730 tho, they have to be in the same series but the higher card downclocks to match the lower one so it is pretty pointless. just get 2 of these at 1ghz cant go wrong

gerikoh · 06-30-09

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Originally Posted by sodaholic134

SOURCE

I think I'll wait for the 4790.

+1. but nah. it'd be better to wait for the 5800 series.

though this only costs about $70 in my local store.

sodaholic134 · 06-30-09

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Originally Posted by gerikoh

+1. but nah. it'd be better to wait for the 5800 series.

though this only costs about $70 in my local store.

Yeah, I keep telling myself "just wait a few more months..."

I'm pretty sure I'll get a 5850. For $200...hopefully.

d3v0 · 06-30-09

It's kind of a mess haha. Its a power guzzling loud ....9800GT??????

videoman5 · 06-30-09

Quote:

Originally Posted by el gappo

no i dont think so, you could xfire a 4770 and 4730 tho, they have to be in the same series but the higher card downclocks to match the lower one so it is pretty pointless. just get 2 of these at 1ghz cant go wrong

But the 4730 uses the same core as the 4800 series. The 4770 uses a different core.

sLowEnd · 06-30-09

Lower performance than the 8800GT/9800GT
Higher power consumption than the 8800GT/9800GT
Louder than the 8800GT/9800GT

Runs hot too...

I'll pass.

Decade · 06-30-09

Quote:

Originally Posted by sLowEnd

Lower performance than the 8800GT/9800GT
Higher power consumption than the 8800GT/9800GT
Louder than the 8800GT/9800GT

Runs hot too...

I'll pass.

This and... two six pins? What the hell?

Gurr · 07-01-09

Quote:

Originally Posted by el gappo

no i dont think so, you could xfire a 4770 and 4730 tho, they have to be in the same series but the higher card downclocks to match the lower one so it is pretty pointless. just get 2 of these at 1ghz cant go wrong

I don't think that the higher card downclocks to the lower cards potential. Maybe in Nvidia SLI it does, but with Xfire, the work is just offloaded proportianally to each video card based on it's power. Unless they changed Xfire from the 3 series to the 4 series, that was one of the better points of Xfire compared to SLI.

Also, the 4770 is a different core as already stated. Though I have no clue if you can or can't crossfire them.

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[TPU] Sapphire HD 4730 512 MB Review

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