Introduction

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.

Packaging

Sapphire uses their "Lite Retail" package for their HD 4730. This allows them to be more cost effective and doesn't give you a huge package with a lot of useless stuff in it.

Contents

You will receive:

• Graphics card
• Documentation + Driver CD
• PCI-Express power cables
• Sapphire Sticker

The Card

The card looks very similar to Sapphire's HD 4850 and HD 4830 even though a different PCB seems to be used. With the cooler the card requires two slots in your system.


The card has one analog port, one DVI port and one HDMI port. Having an analog port is important for a lot of low-end and midrange cards because users don't want (or know how) to use DVI adapters. If you want to connect the card to your big TV screen you can use the native HDMI output which supports HDMI Audio as well.
For HDMI Audio, NVIDIA requires you to feed an external audio source, for example from your motherboard's on-board audio, to the card via SPDIF cable. AMD on the other hand has integrated a sound device inside their GPUs which is the easier solution for most users.


You may combine up to four HD 4730 cards in CrossFire for increased performance or higher image quality settings. There is no official statement whether you can mix the HD 4730 with other RV770 based cards. I tried with the HD 4830, HD 4850, HD 4870 and HD 4890 using Catalyst 9.6 under Windows Vista and could not get a CrossFire setup established.


Here are the front and the back of the card, high-res versions are also available (front, back). If you choose to use these images for voltmods etc, please include a link back to this site or let us post your article.