Sapphire introduces HD4730

When AMD's Radeon HD4770 graphics card was launched AMD said farewell to its HD4830 card. The two cards were very similar in performance, but thanks to the smaller 40nm chip in the HD4770, the HD4830 had become obsolete. The HD4830 was constructed as an HD4850, but with only 640 stream processors. This GPU, which had some of the RV770 core's shader blocks disabled, was branded RV770LE.

The fact that AMD still has a large number of these 55nm chips is shown by the introduction of a new graphics card, the Radeon HD4730. Unlike the HD4830, this card will have a 128-bits memory interface with GDDR5 memory, which provides about an equal memory bandwidth.

The HD4730 was already shown by PowerColor, but manufacturer Sapphire has also added the card to its line-up. Sapphire's model features a blue PCB and an aluminum dualslot cooler for the GPU. A heatsink has been placed on top of the power design of the card, increasing overclock potential. Sapphire has the RV770LE chip clocked at 700 MHz, while the 512 MB GDDR5 memory effectively runs at 3600 MHz. There are connectors for VGA, DVI and HDMI on the card. The pre-order price for this new Radeon HD4730 is about 80 Euro.

Sapphire HD4730 with RV770LE chip and GDDR5 memory

To keep an overview of the mentioned cards, the diagram below shows the most important specifications of each model.

Tags: ddr3 gddr5 hd4850 hdmi overclocking radeon hd4770

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