Sapphire HD7730 2GB GDDR3 and 1GB GDDR5 Review

Lets face it, owning a GTX Titan or even a HD7970 is a pipe dream for most people, verified by the fact that the biggest chunk of sales for both AMD and Nvidia is under £100. To satisfy your budget cravings today we look at the latest HD7730 cards from Sapphire, in both GDDR3 and GDDR5 flavours. Building a budget system can be tricky. Every penny counts, and budgeting more for a graphics card might mean you have to skimp on the power supply for instance. Sapphire's latest HD7730 2GB GDDR3 and 1GB GDDR5 cards are not in stock yet, but we have been told that the price for both will be around the £55 inc vat point. This will be very enticing for an enthusiast user working to a tight overall budget. Sapphire sent us one 2GB HD7730 GDDR3 and two 1GB HD7730 GDDR5 cards - giving us the option to test the water with software Crossfire. We landed some other cards for comparison in this article today, the VTX3D HD7750, Asus GT630, eVGA GTX650 and Sparkle GTX650Ti. This little selection of budget cards will detail performance between £50 and £110, including some Crossfire results from the HD7730 cards. Crossfire is interesting, as it may be perfectly practical to buy one HD7730 then upgrade the system later simply by adding another. Above, the cards on test today. All are using the latest Catalyst 13.6 and Forceware 320.49 drivers, respectively for the AMD and Nvidia oriented solutions. The VTX3D HD7750 is included to show potential gains from spending that extra £25-£30 on the more expensive model. The HD7730 has 384 unified shaders and the HD7750 has 512 unifed shaders. Additionally, the ROP and TMU count increases from 8/24 to 16/32 respectively. All of these cards are tied into a narrow 128 bit memory interface. The Sapphire HD7730 1GB GDDR5 memory runs at 1,125mhz (4.5Gbps effective), which is identical to the more costly HD7750 model. The HD7730 2GB GDDR3 model however is slower, with the memory running at 900mhz (1.8GBps effective - as its GDDR3). The memory bandwidth speeds are therefore reduced from 72.0 GB/s to only 28.8 GB/s which should have a largely negative effect on the frame rates. The Nvidia cards start with the budget 2GB GT630, which is priced around £50 inc vat. The more expensive 4GB model is around £10 extra. This card has only 96 CUDA cores, compared against 384 and 768 on the GTX650 and GTX650ti respectively. The GTX630 has 4 ROPs and 16 TMU's compared to 16/32 on the GTX650 and 16/64 on the GTX650ti. All of these cards are tied into a 128 bit memory interface and the cheapest GT630 has 2GB GDDR3 onboard, compared against 1GB GDDR5 on both GTX650 and GTX650ti. The GT630 produces memory bandwidth of 28.8GB/s, matching the 2GB GDDR3 Sapphire HD7730. The box art features one of Sapphire's 3D rendered army women complete with oversized bosom and armed to the teeth, ready for some action. Inside, the card is bundled inside a cardboard box, protected in an anti static bag. The accessories rest alongside the HD7730. The tiny card is built on a blue PCB with a black cooler and blue fan installed on top. The rear of the card has 1GB of the GDDR3 memory visible. Sapphire can keep the price of this card almost identical to the GDDR5 version, which only features 1GB of memory. Why? GDDR3 is cheaper to produce. The dual slot card has a single VGA, HDMI and DVI port as shown above. The other 1GB of GDDR3 is visible once we get the cooler off. The cooler is not a heavy duty design, as the HD7730 isn't a hot running design. Even though the extra 1GB of GDDR3 memory is a dead giveaway, there is a sticker on the rear of the PCB which highlights the model, shown above. On this page we present some super high resolution images of the product taken with the 24.5MP Nikon D3X camera and 24-70mm ED lens. These will take much longer to open due to the dimensions, especially on slower connections. If you use these pictures on another site or publication, please credit Kitguru.net as the owner/source. You can right click and ‘save as’ to your computer to view later. Identical box artwork to the GDDR3 version, although the 'star' panel top right highlights the 1GB of GDDR5 memory with this model. Sapphire include literature and a software/driver disc. We do recommend you get the latest drivers direct from the AMD website however as the drivers on the disc may be several months out of date. The card looks almost identical to the GDDR3 version of the card, however the rear of the PCB has no memory chips visible. All of the memory is installed on the other side of the PCB. The dual slot card has a single VGA, HDMI and DVI port as shown above. Not a surprise to see the same tiny cooler on this card, but it really shouldn't need anything more significant. We will test this later however. On this page we present some super high resolution images of the product taken with the 24.5MP Nikon D3X camera and 24-70mm ED lens. These will take much longer to open due to the dimensions, especially on slower connections. If you use these pictures on another site or publication, please credit Kitguru.net as the owner/source. You can right click and ‘save as’ to your computer to view later. For the review today we are using the latest Catalyst 13.6 and Forceware 320.49 drivers for the AMD and Nvidia oriented solutions. All cards were specifically tested in the last week for this review. The HD7730 doesn't have a crossfire connector, but AMD drivers support software Crossfire - simply plug the cards into two PCI E slots and the Catalyst Control Center should offer the option in the performance tab. We didn't have a problem on our Rampage IV Extreme board anyway. Test System Processor: Core i7 3960 X Extreme Edition @ 4.4ghz Graphics Cards: Sapphire HD7730 2GB GDDR3 and 1GB GDDR5 Cooler: Antec 920 H20 Memory: 16GB G.Skill 2,400mhz @ 10-11-10-30 Motherboard: Asus Rampage IV Extreme Power Supply: Enermax Platimax 1250W Optical Drive: Asus BluRay Drive Chassis: Lian Li PC-A77FR Aluminium Red Full Tower Case Boot Drive: Patriot WildFire 120GB Secondary Drive: 1TB Samsung Monitors: Dell U3011 Other video cards: VTX HD7750 Asus GT630 eVGA GTX650 Sparkle GTX650Ti Software: Windows 7 Enterprise 64 bit Unigine Heaven Benchmark Unigine Valley Benchmark 3DMark Vantage 3DMark 11 3DMark Fraps Professional Steam Client FurMark Games: Alien V Predator (Direct X 11) Sleeping Dogs (Direct X 11) Total War Shogun 2 (Direct X 11) Tomb Raider (Direct X 11) Dirt Showdown (Direct X 11) GRID 2 (Direct X 11) Metro Last Light (Direct X 11) All the latest BIOS updates and drivers are used during testing. We perform generally under real world conditions, meaning KitGuru tests games across five closely matched runs and then average out the results to get an accurate median figure. If we use scripted benchmarks, they are mentioned on the relevant page. Unigine provides an interesting way to test hardware. It can be easily adapted to various projects due to its elaborated software design and flexible toolset. A lot of their customers claim that they have never seen such extremely-effective code, which is so easy to understand. Heaven Benchmark is a DirectX 11 GPU benchmark based on advanced Unigine engine from Unigine Corp. It reveals the enchanting magic of floating islands with a tiny village hidden in the cloudy skies. Interactive mode provides emerging experience of exploring the intricate world of steampunk. Efficient and well-architected framework makes Unigine highly scalable: Multiple API (DirectX 9 / DirectX 10 / DirectX 11 / OpenGL) render Cross-platform: MS Windows (XP, Vista, Windows 7) / Linux Full support of 32bit and 64bit systems Multicore CPU support Little / big endian support (ready for game consoles) Powerful C++ API Comprehensive performance profiling system Flexible XML-based data structures We use the following settings: 1920×1080 resolution and 1280x720. Anti Aliasing off. Anisotrophy 4, Tessellation normal. Shaders High. Stereo 3D disabled. API: Direct X 11. The Sapphire HD7730 GDDR5 1GB is noticeably faster than the 2GB GDDR3 version, averaging 33.5 fps compared to 29.6 fps. The ASUS GT630 delivers terrible results in this test, significantly behind both HD7730 cards. In Crossfire, the HD7730 1GB GDDR5 tops the chart, slightly ahead of the Sparkle GTX650Ti solution. Two of the HD7730's would cost around £110-£120, close to the price of the Sparkle GTX650Ti. Valley Benchmark is a new GPU stress-testing tool from the developers of the very popular and highly acclaimed Heaven Benchmark. The forest-covered valley surrounded by vast mountains amazes with its scale from a bird’s-eye view and is extremely detailed down to every leaf and flower petal. This non-synthetic benchmark powered by the state-of-the art UNIGINE Engine showcases a comprehensive set of cutting-edge graphics technologies with a dynamic environment and fully interactive modes available to the end user. We used the settings above at both 1280x720 and 1920x1080 resolutions. AMD haven't optimised this engine as well as the Heaven Benchmark. The Sparkle GTX650Ti takes top position in the chart. Again the GDDR5 version of the HD7730 outperforms the GDDR3 version by around 4 frames per second. Noticeable. Futuremark released 3DMark Vantage, on April 28, 2008. It is a benchmark based upon DirectX 10, and therefore will only run under Windows Vista (Service Pack 1 is stated as a requirement) and Windows 7. This is the first edition where the feature-restricted, free of charge version could not be used any number of times. 1280×1024 resolution was used with performance settings. Some interesting results with this benchmark. At the entry level settings, the HD7730 in Crossfire takes top position with the Sparkle GTX650Ti taking second spot. At the performance settings however the results reverse with the GTX650 ti scoring around 1,000 points more than the Crossfired configuration. Again, the GDDR5 HD7730 is noticeably faster than the GDDR3 version, even with a 1GB memory deficit. In this case, more is certainly not better. 3DMark 11 is designed for testing DirectX 11 hardware running on Windows 7 and Windows Vista the benchmark includes six all new benchmark tests that make extensive use of all the new features in DirectX 11 including tessellation, compute shaders and multi-threading. After running the tests 3DMark gives your system a score with larger numbers indicating better performance. Trusted by gamers worldwide to give accurate and unbiased results, 3DMark 11 is the best way to test DirectX 11 under game-like loads.If you want to learn more about this benchmark, or to buy it yourself, head over to this page. This is a very intensive benchmark and we can see that the Sparkle GTX650Ti manages to slightly outperform the two HD7730 1GB GDDR5 cards configured in Crossfire. The GT630 really is left behind by either of the Sapphire solutions. 3DMark is an essential tool used by millions of gamers, hundreds of hardware review sites and many of the world’s leading manufacturers to measure PC gaming performance. Futuremark say “Use it to test your PC’s limits and measure the impact of overclocking and tweaking your system. Search our massive results database and see how your PC compares or just admire the graphics and wonder why all PC games don’t look this good. To get more out of your PC, put 3DMark in your PC.” The latest Direct X 11 benchmark shows the Sparkle GTX650Ti card out in front, ahead of the HD7730 GDDR5 Crossfire configuration. The Sapphire HD7730 GDDR5 1GB scores around 400 points more than the GDDR3 version. The Asus GT630 talks bottom position in the chart. Aliens V Predator has proved to be a big seller since the release and Sega have taken the franchise into new territory after taking it from Sierra. AVP is a Direct X 11 supported title and delivers not only advanced shadow rendering but high quality tessellation for the cards on test today. To test the cards we used a 1280x720 and 1920×1080 resolution with DX11, Texture Quality Very High, MSAA Samples 1, 16 af, ambient occulsion on, shadow complexity high, motion blur on. The Sapphire HD7730 GDDR5 scores a little higher than the GDDR3 version, averaging 40 frames per second, against 37 frames per second. The Sparkle GTX650Ti gets the top performance spot in the chart, outperforming the HD7730 GDDR5 cards in Crossfire. Sleeping Dogs started development as an original title, but was announced in 2009 as True Crime: Hong Kong, the third installment and a reboot of the True Crime series. As a result of the game’s high development budget and delays, it was canceled by Activision Blizzard in 2011. Six months later, it was announced that Square Enix had picked up the publishing rights to the game, but the game was renamed Sleeping Dogs in 2012 since Square Enix did not purchase the True Crime name rights. We use the HIGH preset as shown above and test at 1280x720 resolution. This is a very demanding game and none of the hardware on test today would manage smooth frame rates at 1080p with the extreme graphics settings. The difference between the GDDR3 and GDDR5 version of the HD7730 is very noticeable in this game at these settings. The GDDR5 version is almost fully playable, dropping to 24 frames per second only a few times. The HD7750 delivers noticeable improvements in this game, thanks to the enhanced shader prowess. The GT630 rests way at the bottom of the pile. After a delayed release from late 2012 to March 2013, the game received much anticipation and hype. Tomb Raider received much acclaim from critics, who praised the graphics, the gameplay and Camilla Luddington’s performance as Lara, with many critics agreeing that the game is a solid and much needed reboot of the franchise. Much criticism went to the addition of the multiplayer which many felt was unnecessary. Tomb Raider went on to sell one million copies in forty-eight hours of its release, and has sold 3.4 million copies worldwide so far. We selected the ULTRA profile and tested all the cards at 1280x720, as shown above. Tomb Raider is a demanding game at the Ultra settings and some of the hardware fails to produce playable frame rates at these settings. The HD7730 cards struggle to cope at times, although the GDDR5 version of the hardware performs at a noticeably higher level and is less juddery at these settings. Still a little more reduction of image quality settings would be beneficial. The Crossfire configuration suffered from significant frame rate drop at times. Shogun 2 is set in 16th-century feudal Japan, in the aftermath of the Ōnin War. The country is fractured into rival clans led by local warlords, each fighting for control. The player takes on the role of one of these warlords, with the goal of dominating other factions and claiming his rule over Japan. The standard edition of the game will feature a total of eight factions (plus a ninth faction for the tutorial), each with a unique starting position and different political and military strengths. We run the DX11 Graphics balanced 720p benchmark, available for this game in STEAM. You can therefore directly compare against your own system. Both Sapphire HD7730 cards deliver reasonably good frame rates at 720p with these balanced settings. Again the GDDR5 version of the card generates slightly higher frame rates. The GT630 is the only card that struggles to maintain smooth frame rates at these settings. Dirt Showdown is the latest title in the franchise from Codemasters, based around the famous Colin McRae racing game series, although it no longer uses his name, since he passed away in 2007. We set the game to the HIGH profile settings at 720p resolution. This is a high performing engine on AMD hardware and we can see excellent results from all the solutions on test. Even the Asus GT630, which has struggled to maintain smooth frame rates in some of the other games never drops to 30 frames per second. Grid 2 is the sequel to the racing video game Race Driver: Grid. It was developed and published by Codemasters. The game includes numerous real world locations such as Paris, numerous United States locations, and many more, and also includes motor vehicles spanning four decades. In addition, it includes a new handling system that developer Codemasters has dubbed ‘TrueFeel’, which aims to hit a sweet spot between realism and accessibility. We tested with the high preset at 1280x720 with 4x Anti Aliasing enabled and with the high preset at 1920x1080. Both Sapphire HD7730 graphics cards can handle this engine at the settings we used, maintaining a smooth experience at all times, above 30 frames per second. Metro:Last Light takes place one year after the events of Metro 2033, proceeding from the canonical ending from the novel, ending where Artyom chose to call down the missile strike on the Dark Ones. A hidden 'Karma' system based on the players actions during the game, such as shooting surrendering enemies or killing non-hostile mutants (negative karma), or listening to NPC conversations or donating to beggars in stations (positive karma), is present throughout the game, but it's results are not revealed until the last level. We configured the engine to use the settings above - 1280x720 with high image quality. This game runs very well on the latest Nvidia hardware. The GTX650ti comes out on top, followed by the GTX650. The Sapphire HD7730 solutions are both playable, however the GDDR3 version of the card suffers dramatically, highlighting the memory bandwidth performance differences (GDDR5 - 72.0 GB/s and GDDR3 - 28.8 GB/s). The tests were performed in a controlled air conditioned room with temperatures maintained at a constant 24c – a comfortable environment for the majority of people reading this. Idle temperatures were measured after sitting at the desktop for 30 minutes.Load measurements were acquired by playing Crysis Warhead for 30 minutes and measuring the peak temperature. We also have included Furmark results, recording maximum temperatures throughout a 30 minute stress test. All fan settings were left on automatic. The Sapphire HD7730 2GB GDDR3 version runs cooler than the GDDR5 version, although both are cool running cards. It is interesting to see the weakest card on test today, the ASUS GT630 is also the hottest running under load. This is related to the fan setup however, detailed on the next page. We have built a system inside a Lian Li chassis with no case fans and have used a fanless cooler on our CPU. The motherboard is also passively cooled. This gives us a build with almost completely passive cooling and it means we can measure noise of just the graphics card inside the system when we run looped 3dMark tests. We measure from a distance of around 1 meter from the closed chassis and 4 foot from the ground to mirror a real world situation. Ambient noise in the room measures close to the limits of our sound meter at 28dBa. Why do this? Well this means we can eliminate secondary noise pollution in the test room and concentrate on only the video card. It also brings us slightly closer to industry standards, such as DIN 45635. KitGuru noise guide 10dBA - Normal Breathing/Rustling Leaves 20-25dBA – Whisper 30dBA - High Quality Computer fan 40dBA - A Bubbling Brook, or a Refridgerator 50dBA - Normal Conversation 60dBA - Laughter 70dBA – Vacuum Cleaner or Hairdryer 80dBA - City Traffic or a Garbage Disposal 90dBA - Motorcycle or Lawnmower 100dBA – MP3 player at maximum output 110dBA - Orchestra 120dBA – Front row rock concert/Jet Engine 130dBA – Threshold of Pain 140dBA – Military Jet takeoff/Gunshot (close range) 160dBA – Instant Perforation of eardrum None of the cards on test today emit much noise at all, even under load. The ASUS GT630 has a set profile and the fan speed doesn't alter at all. holding at around 50% even when tasked with the synthetic Furmark stress test. Both of the Sapphire HD7730 graphics cards are relatively quiet at all times and ideal for a low noise, inexpensive gaming system. There can be no argument that we would all love an Nvidia GTX Titan, but for many people the eye popping price would be enough to build a complete, yet perfectly capable gaming system. For those with even tighter budget constraints building a new gaming system can be both confusing and frustrating. Which graphics card to buy while leaving enough cash free to acquire a decent checklist of components for the rest of the build? We don't often review budget graphics cards however there is a huge audience for these products. It may be a shock to some enthusiast users but both Nvidia and AMD acquire the bulk of their income selling masses of sub £100 video cards. Sapphire sent us their latest HD7730 2GB GDDR3 and HD7730 1GB GDDR5 cards, which should both hit retail at around the £55 inc vat point - the same price as the ASUS GT630 solution we compared against today. There is no doubt that the GT630 is seriously outclassed by both Sapphire cards in every test today. Technically, the very constrained memory bandwidth and limited shader power mean the card falls right at the bottom of the pile today. 96 CUDA cores on the GT630 mean that ultimate performance is always going to be very limited. The GTX650 and GTX650ti may be significantly more expensive, but they are equipped with 385 and 768 CUDA cores, respectively. With £60 available today we would certainly opt for the Sapphire HD7730 1GB GDDR5 GPU, it is markedly faster than the GDDR3 version and we see no benefit from the extra 1GB of memory, especially at the resolutions and image quality settings this particular AMD solution is designed to handle. With such a tight 128 bit interface the limited 28.8GB/s memory bandwidth has a negative impact on the frame rates. The GDDR5 version of the card managed to produce 72.0GB/s of memory bandwidth and this translated into a much better real world gaming experience. Spending £20 extra means we can move up to a 1GB HD7750, which is markedly quicker than the HD7730. Not a shock really, but that £20 can translate into noticeable frame rate improvements. At 720p demanding titles such as Tomb Raider (Direct X 11) are much smoother, with the eye candy set at a reasonably high level. Both HD7730's struggled to maintain >30 frame rates throughout our test environment with these settings. Nvidia's GT630 just couldn't handle that game at all, unless we lowered the resolution to 1024x768 or reduced the image quality settings further. If you can afford around £90 then the Nvidia GTX650 is a good option and with some special deals right now at £99.95 for the GTX650ti, this is a difficult solution to ignore. Two of the GDDR5 HD7730 graphics cards can't quite match the GTX650ti and the overall gaming experience is slightly smoother with the single Nvidia card installed. That said, AMD are due to release a brand new specialised driver to help resolve frame pacing issues so we would expect this situation to improve very soon. We sadly didn't get time to test for this review. If you have around £60 to spare and can not afford to spend anymore then our choice is the Sapphire HD7730 1GB GDDR5, it is a quiet running graphics card that doesn't emit a lot of heat. It is clearly faster than the GDDR3 version. We can see no reason why the extra 1GB of GDDR3 is needed on a budget card such as this, especially for a gamer on a budget. The significantly higher bandwidth speed translates into a much smoother real world gaming experience. The Nvidia GT630 at the same price can simply not offer a significant challenge. Pros: Only £55. Both HD7730's are quiet. low heat output. takes all the power from the slot. At under £60 there doesn't appear to be any competition. Software Crossfire means you can add another card in later. Cons: GDDR3 version is markedly slower. Kitguru says: Sapphire's 1GB GDDR5 HD7730 gets a thumbs up. The best all round enthusiast gaming GPU below £60.