While at the consumer market level companies such as AMD, NVIDIA and Intel are crystal clear about their product line ups and take initiatives to keep the world informed by means of press-releases, employee leaks and events such as IDF, Cinema 2.0 and NVISION, the OEM market is a wild place, it's the Amazon, lot is left undisclosed to consumers since the products go from manufacturers to OEMs directly bypassing public distribution channels (and lopping taxes, middlemen, etc.).

3D News Russia, got hold of a graphics card made by ASUS that's reported by GPU-Z as "HD3730" in the GPU Name field. Specifications of this card are in the window itself, not much to tell:



Specifications-wise it is identical to the Radeon HD 3650 albeit different GPU and memory clock speeds, comes with 1 GB of DDR2 memory across a 128 bit wide bus. I spoke with W1zzard, the author of GPU-Z for his take. Here's what we observed:

• The name string could be manipulated, hence the BIOS version was looked up from our extensive database of GPU BIOS, it didn't match any of our BIOS ROMs.
  
• The driver shouldn't report a Radeon HD 2000 (and above) series GPU as HDxxxx without a space between "HD" and the model number.
  
• Those are some very odd numbers, to give it a higher model number compared to a HD 3650.
  
• ASUS Russia website has no entry for this product (obviously, otherwise why this 'sighting'?)
  

Here are its pictures:


A quick 3DMark evaluation (default settings):

• 3DMark 2003 – 10692
  
• 3DMark 2005 – 8381
  
• 3DMark 2006 – 3774
  

Sightings such as this are not new. There had been stray incidents in the past, such as spotting a GeForce GTX 280 accelerator on British online store OCUK with unreal card parameters, and another one where the 9800 GT was spotted months before its release going on sale in the Chinese markets.

With inputs from: 3D News Russia