PowerColor Radeon HD 7730 1GB Graphics Card Review

A Closer Look

The card uses a small 60mm PWM cooling fan on top of a monolithic black aluminium lump. This is encased in a black styled plastic shroud.

The unit has a bright red PCB which certainly won’t be to everyone’s taste but hey it is a very budget card.

Here you can see more closely the rather puny heatsink of this reference design. AIB partners do have some custom cooled ones out there but you will have to pay a bit more for them, and its worth nothing if you pay a bit more for that luxurious custom cooler you can afford to get the next model up (the HD 7750) so it is almost pointless as this card doesn’t get very hot and certainly isn’t meant for overclocking.

Display outputs are quite limited as you have only three, but they are all full sized which is nice. There is a DP 1.2 MST capable port, a HDMI and a DVI. This card does support up to six monitors, one via DVI, one via HDMI and four via the DP 1.2 MST if you use an MST hub with four outputs. Currently you can only buy MST Hubs supporting three ports but in the future there will be four port ones available. One DP 1.2 MST port can support up to four 1080p displays so you could run six 1080p displays on this card – an amazing feature for such a low cost solution – of course the MST Hub would end up being more expensive than the card so you may just end up going for a more expensive AMD graphics card with enough outputs for six displays. Though if you purely want six displays with as low power consumption as possible then this is AMD’s best affordable consumer option.

The card is single slot which is great for small form factor systems and HTPCs.

The HD 7730 is identical in shape and size to the HD 7750. As we mentioned it is simply a cut-down version.

Compared to the HD 7770, which is quite a small card, the HD 7730 looks pretty small. I think you get the idea by now – it is thin and small so ideal for space constrained environments.

The HD 7730 is still relatively new so GPU-Z doesn’t appear to pick up all the details/ Though it recognises memory bandwidth, clock speeds and TMUs correctly. It detects just 8 ROPS despite the unit having 16.