Radeon HD 4870 in disguise?
The cooling seems a little over the top for a mid-range card on first glance. Sapphire adds in a large heatsink for the voltage-regulation components, lined up on the right-hand side.
Here's where we learn some more about the provenance of the card. The PCB is labelled as 109-B50731-11, which, funnily enough, is the same code for Sapphire's Radeon HD 4870 512MB card.
Further, look even farther right and you'll see two six-pin PCIe power connectors. They're patently not needed for the HD 4730, so it seems as if Sapphire is literally chopping HD 4870s and using them as a mid-range card.
A chunky heatsink is larger than what we'd expect if the Radeon HD 4730 was a regular mid-range card. The HSF is tall enough to occupy the adjacent slot, which is disappointing for folk with smaller chassis.
We found the cooler to be fairly loud when idling, certainly more than we'd like, and slightly noisy when under full load. Depending upon how many 'disabled' HD 4870s make the HD 4730 grade, we might see Sapphire opt for a better-performing, quieter heatsink.
Assuming our analysis is correct and the card is a semi-disabled Radeon HD 4870 512MB, Sapphire's removed/switched-off two blocks of processing units - 80 SPs each - and eight of the card's 16 ROPs. The reason to remove half the ROPs is down to Sapphire wanting a 128-bit memory bus, through two memory controllers instead of four, so it's logical that the ROPs had to go.
512MB of memory is split over both sides, with each side connecting to a 64-bit-wide memory-controller
The dual six-pin connectors aren't strictly necessary on this card, but are left over from the HD 4870's PCB.
Outputs are good, including VGA, DVI, and HDMI.
Designing to a budget, there's not much of a bundle; the outputs pretty much cover everything.
Sapphire's Radeon HD 4730 512MB is backed up by a two-year warranty. Claims in the first year are handled by the supplier from whom the card was purchased from. Claims after this period are handled by a European-based service centre.
