Sapphire Radeon HD7730 with GCN architecture hits budget zone

Sapphire has announced the latest addition to their range of AMD graphics cards, the Radeon HD7730.

Designed to bring the benefits of the GCN architecture to budget buyers who can’t afford the Radeon HD7750, this card will effectively address the same market as the Radeon HD6670.

MyGaming contacted local distributors for pricing and availability details. The Sapphire version will be distributed by Esquire and AxisWorkgroup and other brands may release their own versions of the card during the course of the next few weeks.

The HD7730 1GB GDDR5 has a RRP of R999, while the 2GB GDDR3 version (not listed below) will retail for around R1,150. Both will sport Sapphire’s custom cooler design.

The new HD7730 is part of the Cape Verde family which comprises of the Radeon HD7730 and the HD7770. Its built on the 28nm process and looks very, very similar to the same graphics core that’s found in the AMD APU family.

The graphics cores in the APUs, however, are based on AMD’s VLIW5 architecture.

Radeon HD7730	Specifications
Shader Units	384
TMU count	24
ROP count	16
GPU Clock speed (MHz)	800MHz (no boost)
Memory clock speed (MHz)	1125MHz (4.0GHz effective)
Memory size and type	1GB GDDR5
Memory bandwidth	72GB/s
Memory Buz size	128-bit
Reference PCB length (mm)	168mm or 6.61 inches
Thermal Design Power (TDP)	47W
Power Supply requirement	300W

With only 384 shader cores, a low TDP of 47W and a 800MHz clock speed, the HD7730 will be anywhere between 50-100% faster than the HD6670 it replaces and it doesn’t require an expensive power supply to run.

It may very well be that this is also going to be the card that AMD recommends pairing with their AMD Kaveri APU, due for a Q4 2013 launch.

The card’s closest competitor will be Nvidia’s GTX650, which comes in a little higher in terms of the numbers on paper, but real-world tests should demonstrate that they are at the same level of performance.

If the Radeon HD7730 is going to be successful, AMD may release it with a RRP of $60, almost half the cost of the GTX650 with equivalent performance.