A Radeon ''HD3730'' Makes for UFO Sightings in Russia

[btarunr]

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

[tkpenalty]

I want a HD3666 or HD4444

[btarunr]

Get a HD 666. Oh la la evil is wicked good.

interesting that even Wizz doesn't know anything .

[btarunr]

Originally Posted by wolf2009

interesting that even Wizz doesn't know anything .

He says it looks part real / part fake, not that he doesn't know. GPU-Z is engineered in a way that it detects even those GPUs partially that don't have a database entry. The name string is produced from the Device ID = string or what the driver gives for such GPUs.

I wouldn't rule out the possibility of someone editing the driver's .inf and the card's BIOS for his 15 minutes of fame.

[GoriLLakoS]

Hello guys

Nothing is strange on this . . .

If you are a big PC Builder and want 5K VGAs from NV or ATi you can ask whatever you want to.
And if the stuff you require is on the mid-end stuff, it is much more easier to do it

[WarEagleAU]

Looks pretty interesting from this point.

[zithe]

GTX 911! What your neighbor calls a few minutes after you plug it in.

[hat]

just 3774? my 8600gts scores way higher than that

[Sasqui]

Do I see DDR2?

[Wshlist]

800MHz GPU and superslow 128bit interfaced DDR2 RAM, talk about being bandwidth crippled.

[PrudentPrincess]

I'm calling fake because:
1) It has no crossfire but its not low profile, that makes no sense to me
2) GPU-Z is easily fakeable, and 3DMark results without pictures is BS
3) There's no way they would get a hold of a unreleased card that isn't a reference. (Why would they be using an ASUS this early?)

There's my two cents.

[zithe]

Don't they have a larger version of the image in the center of the 3? I'd like to examine it..
Edit1: Those ARE GDDR2 chips. Why would they use GDDR2? Sounds hoakey!
Edit2: It's just a flashed 3650...

[Baum]

if this card exists it would be only a 128Bit 1GB Version to get People to Buy who have no clue what influences the Bandwith ATI for that

[hat]

looks like a shooped 2600

[PCpraiser100]

i still can't believe that we are still howling over the HD 3000 series. Either way, this might be an interesting gig for AMD to mimic the GT cards that Nvidia releases to help gamers save money over the 9800 series.