Several sites have reported the launch of the Radeon HD 4730 - a gap fill for the lack of HD 4770s. AMD has confirmed the launch and given us the details on the availability of its star card. It admits having had problems fullfulling the “enthusiastic” market demand for the HD 4770. In particular it cites technical problems with TSMC’s 40 nm fabrication process. AMD says that “initial demand” was satisfied but that supply is still not keeping up with it’s objectives.
So as to fill the gap, ATI/AMD has created the Radeon HD 4730 which is simply an HD 4830 with GDDR5 memory and a 128 bit bus (instead of GDDR3 with a 256 bit bus). So instead of a card based on the RV740 and engraved at 40 nm we have an RV770LE engraved at 55 nm. VR-Zone has already presented a PowerColor version of the card for around $90. It still has to be tested to see how it does against the Radeon HD 4770. According to the rumours, the HD 4730 is clocked at 700 MHz (core) and 900 MHz (memory). The clocks for the HD 4770 are 750 and 800 MHz respectively, meaning the HD 4730 has less processing power but superior memory bandwidth.
