Sapphire HD 4730 512 MB

**akhilles** · 07-02-2009 08:53 AM

Author: W1zzard
Date: Jun 30th 2009

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.

Code:

			4550	9500GT	4670	9600GT	4730	4830	4770	GTS 250	4850	4870
Shader units		80	32	320	64	640	640	640	128	800	800
ROPs			4	8	8	16	8	16	16	16	16	16
GPU			RV710	G96	RV730	G94	RV770	RV770	RV740	G92	RV770	RV770
Transistors		242M	314M	512M	505M	956M	956M	826M	754M	956M	956M
Memory Size		512MB	256/512	512MB	512MB	512MB	512MB	512MB	1024MB	512MB	512MB
Memory Bus Width	64bit	128bit	128bit	256bit	128bit	256bit	128bit	256bit	256bit	256bit
Core Clock		600Mhz	550Mhz	750Mhz	650Mhz	750Mhz	575Mhz	750Mhz	738Mhz	625Mhz	750Mhz
Memory Clock		800Mhz	900Mhz	1000Mhz	900Mhz	900Mhz	900Mhz	800Mhz	1100Mhz	993Mhz	900Mhz
Price			$47	$50	$65	$75	$79	$87	$110	$130	$130	$155