Sapphire HD7730 2GB GDDR3 and 1GB GDDR5 Review

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 1024×768 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.

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