Sapphire HD 7730 1GB GDDR5 Video Card Review

Closer Look

The card itself has a dual slot cooler with a large fan and heatsink which should be more than capable of keeping this thing cool.
Around back we see the available outputs, VGA, DVI, and HDMI.

Test System

AMD A10-6800k APU
ASRock FM2A85X Extreme 6 Motherboard
Corsair H100 Cooler
OCZ 700W PSU
NZXT Phantom 410 Case

Synthetic Benchmarks

Pulling up GPU-Z we see that our 7730 packs 384 shaders and 1GB of GDDR5 memory on a 128 bit bus. The core is clocked at 800 MHz and the memory at 1125 MHz as well.
An interesting feature of this card is its ability to pair up with an APU to theoretically boost performance by utilizing the graphics capabilities of the APU’s onboard GPU. We will be comparing the bare 7730 against the 7730 paired with a 6800k.

3DMark


7730	7730 + APU

The new 3DMark benchmark stresses both the GPU and CPU heavily and can easily bring our little 7730 to its knees.
The card by itself pulled a score of 7651 in Cloud Gate and 1583 in Fire Strike. Pairing it up with our APU bumps our Fire Strike up only 3%, but Cloud Gate sees a huge 15% gain which is impressive for a “free” gain.

3DMark 11


7730	7730 + APU

3DMark 11, like the new 3DMark, stresses both CPU and GPU, focusing specifically on DirectX 11 features.
Our 7730 scored 2368 points on the performance preset by itself but saw a massive 27% increase when paired with the 6800k.

Unigine Heaven


7730	7730 + APU

Unigine Heaven is a graphically intensive DirectX 11 benchmark capable of pushing even the most powerful graphics cards to their limits.
By itself our little card was able to average 19.4 fps which isn’t too bad considering the test was run at 1920×1080 with most settings turned up. Unfortunately pairing with our APU saw no gains whatsoever.