AMD has received a lot of positive reviews of its Radeon HD 4770 that with 40nm technology not only offers a good price/performance ratio but also pretty low power consumption. The problem is that AMD’s new graphics card has been nearly impossible to get a hold of. TSMC has problems keeping 40nm production volumes up and the result has been a big deficit of Radeon HD 4770 graphics cards. AMD has started working on a remedy in the form of a relaunch of its popular 55nm circuit.
Radeon HD 4730 is said to appear soon to cover up for the hard-to-find Radeon HD 4770 and to avoid the same manufacturing problems AMD has relied on the older 55nm technology.
The card is basically a shrunk version of Radeon HD 4830, which was phased out after AMD launched Radeon HD 4770. The new RV770CE circuit hasn’t been described in detail yet, but together with faster GDDR5 memory (128-bit bus) Radeon HD 4730 will offer pretty decent performance.
A Radeon HD 4730 card from PowerColor is said to launch before the end of the month and clock frequencies will be 700MHz GPU and 900MHz memory (3600MHz effectively). The price will be around $80.
