Sapphire is the second company, after PowerColor, to launch a new graphics card using AMD’s Radeon HD 4730 GPU. AMD launched the new budget GPU to counter the poor availability of Radeon HD 4770 cards. TSMC is having problems with the new 40nm technology and to not lose customers to competitor NVIDIA, AMD decided to launch HD 4730 using more reliable 55nm technology.
The graphics circuit sports 640 shader processors and Sapphire has just like with the card from PowerColor, the GPU operates 750MHz while the 512MB GDDR5 memory runs at 900MHz (3600MHz effectively).
Based on the RV770 family, Sapphire HD 4730 comes with ATI AVIVO HD, UVD2 and CrossFireX support for connecting multiple cards for better performance.
The card use a dual-slot cooler and DVI, VGA and HDMI outputs. The price of Sapphire Radeon HD 4730 is around $90.
