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ATI Radeon HD 4730 CrossFire |
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Written by Nebojsa Todorovic
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Wednesday, 15 July 2009 |
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Page 2 of 6
Sapphire Radeon HD 4730 512MB
This is usual Sapphire model without any suffix that would suggest that it is suited for enthusiast. It is characterized by design that is typical for whole Sapphire HD 4000 series. PCB is blue, large and very similar to HD 4870 model. On the other hand there are significantly less elements present on PCB which is perfectly normal since this card belongs to completely different price range. The cooling system is already seen on HD 4850 and HD 4830 models: two slot cooler with fan without any “advanced” features like heat pipes and copper segments. Power section is surprisingly complex for a product from this price range, and it is passively cooled with rather large aluminum heat spreader. Memory chips, on the other side, are left “bare and naked”, which isn’t a minus since we didn’t notice any problems with overheating. Cooling system is efficient but we wouldn’t recommend you to build CrossFire with two of these cards. First of all these are cards that will “consume” two slots and a lot of power, and above all cooling system will be very inefficient since PCB of second card will obstruct fan of the first one which can result in dangerously high GPU temperatures.
RV770 which can be found on these cards has 640 Stream Processors set at 750MHz which is significantly higher compared to default values of Radeon HD 4850 and much closer to values of an HD 4770. Memory is signed by Qimonda and certified at 1ns which can operate at 1000MHz. In case of GDDR5 this is effectively 4GHz. Sapphire decided to hold on to official ATI specification, and set memory at 900MHz (3.6GHz). Even if HD 4730, by looking at specifications, can look like an HD 4770, this is not the case. HD 4730 is much “hotter” card, it has much higher power consumption and above all has only 8 ROP units that place HD 4730 model, performance-wise, below HD 4770.
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Graphics cards 
