Advertisement
If you have a new account but are having problems posting or verifying your account, please email us on hello@boards.ie for help. Thanks :)
Hello all! Please ensure that you are posting a new thread or question in the appropriate forum. The Feedback forum is overwhelmed with questions that are having to be moved elsewhere. If you need help to verify your account contact hello@boards.ie

Say Hi To Frankenstein: HD4730

Options
  • 11-07-2009 10:10pm
    #1
    Solitaire
    Moderators, Technology & Internet Moderators Posts: 18,377 Mod ✭✭✭✭


    Yes, I know it's technically "Frankenstein's Monster". Go away. And go here for a review.

    Yes, as expected the problems with 40- and 32-nm processes seem to be bad enough to be causing almost all new products (especially die-shrunk CPUs and GPUs) to plummet.

    ATi seem to have come up with a stop-gap: they're re-releasing the HD4830, but cut down to HD4770 size. Think of it as the worst of both worlds :P The GPU is still an old 55nm RV770 (with only eight out of ten SIMD clusters operational) and this new spinoff of the RV770LE has its memory bus, texture units and ROPs cut down to the same size as the HD4770 (i.e. halved from HD4830). It also has the HD4770s 750MHz stock speed (compared to 575MHz for the HD4830) which in computational terms is dead close to the HD4850 (10 SIMD@625MHz). And while the memory bus is down to 128bit the memory is twice as fast - 512MB of 3600MHz GDDR5. See the catch? The memory is clocked higher than the HD4770, which will help let up on the card's biggest issue (awesome GPU choking on occasional memory bottlenecks) just a bit.

    Now comes the rub. The RV740 had a radically renovated shader pipeline that's over twice as good as the current cards, but ATi seemed to forget that this card is based on the old RV770LE and halved the ROPs just like the HD4770. Bad idea. Now the card has half the shader capability of the HD4830, so even with the crazy clock speed the card is an underperformer in shader-heavy environments, like, err, every modern game actually :o And the other thing about 40nm is that it halves the power consumption. Running a low-binned RV770LE at 750MHz+ requires a big overvolt (likely higher than even the HD4870) and the card requires TWO PCIe power connectors. And boy does it need them! The first batch of tests put its power consumption above the HD4890 and just scraping our thirsty friend, the HD4870. That... isn't good. We're talking two-and-a-half times the power consumption of the HD4770 its based on. And this is a budget card! Budget coolers, of course, have difficulty handling the massive heat output. More fail.

    The 750MHz 55nm part is outrageously non-standard - as of now AMD is only supplying its two biggest board partners (Sapphire and Tul) for the moment. You're most likely to see these oddballs pop up on German sites in the region of €85-90, which just isn't cheap enough to avoid being gutted by the HD4830 and 9800GT that outperform it. Avoid like the plague.


Advertisement