Sapphire HD 4730 512 MB

A Closer Look

Sapphire's cooler comes with a very unique design, the underlying technology is standard however. A copper base transfers heat away quickly from the GPU surface to a number of cooling fins that sit in the airflow created by the fan on top. When taking a close look at the picture you can see that the heatsink base is asymmetrical, this is done to ensure a proper fit since the distance from the GPU to the slot is shorter than to the top edge of the card.


The voltage regulation area is covered by a fairly small metal heatsink that makes sure it stays cool.


While I was experimenting with getting CrossFire to run, I noticed that the HD 4730 got extremely hot and the fan sometimes spun up to 100%. After taking a closer look at the cards, I realized that due to the height of the Sapphire cooler, there is almost no space left for the cooler to suck air in. This results in idle (!) temperatures above 90°C. Such a setup can and most probably will break your graphics card because it overheats. However, since this is a lower midrange card I don't think this is going to be a problem for many users, plenty of space in midrange systems.


Power is delivered to the card via two six pin power connectors which seems to be quite a lot. Both are required to run, it won't work with just one connected.


The GDDR5 memory chips are made by Qimonda and carry the model number IDGV51-05A1F1C-40X. With a cycle time of 1.0 ns, they are specified to run at 1000 MHz (4000 MHz GDDR5 effective).


Instead of the well-known Volterra voltage controllers that allow software voltage control, Sapphire is using the uP6207 voltage controller. It does not have an I2C interface which means that software voltage control is not possible on that card.


Here you can see AMD's RV770 that powers the HD 4730. Is is made in a 55 nm process at TSMC Taiwan with 956 million transistors.