Saturday, August 16th 2008
A Radeon ''HD3730'' Makes for UFO Sightings in Russia
While at the consumer market level companies such as AMD, NVIDIA and Intel are crystal clear about their product line ups and take initiatives to keep the world informed by means of press-releases, employee leaks and events such as IDF, Cinema 2.0 and NVISION, the OEM market is a wild place, it's the Amazon, lot is left undisclosed to consumers since the products go from manufacturers to OEMs directly bypassing public distribution channels (and lopping taxes, middlemen, etc.).
3D News Russia, got hold of a graphics card made by ASUS that's reported by GPU-Z as "HD3730" in the GPU Name field. Specifications of this card are in the window itself, not much to tell:Specifications-wise it is identical to the Radeon HD 3650 albeit different GPU and memory clock speeds, comes with 1 GB of DDR2 memory across a 128 bit wide bus. I spoke with W1zzard, the author of GPU-Z for his take. Here's what we observed:
3D News Russia, got hold of a graphics card made by ASUS that's reported by GPU-Z as "HD3730" in the GPU Name field. Specifications of this card are in the window itself, not much to tell:Specifications-wise it is identical to the Radeon HD 3650 albeit different GPU and memory clock speeds, comes with 1 GB of DDR2 memory across a 128 bit wide bus. I spoke with W1zzard, the author of GPU-Z for his take. Here's what we observed:
- The name string could be manipulated, hence the BIOS version was looked up from our extensive database of GPU BIOS, it didn't match any of our BIOS ROMs.
- The driver shouldn't report a Radeon HD 2000 (and above) series GPU as HDxxxx without a space between "HD" and the model number.
- Those are some very odd numbers, to give it a higher model number compared to a HD 3650.
- ASUS Russia website has no entry for this product (obviously, otherwise why this 'sighting'?)
- 3DMark 2003 - 10692
- 3DMark 2005 - 8381
- 3DMark 2006 - 3774
15 Comments on A Radeon ''HD3730'' Makes for UFO Sightings in Russia
I wouldn't rule out the possibility of someone editing the driver's .inf and the card's BIOS for his 15 minutes of fame.
Nothing is strange on this . . . :)
If you are a big PC Builder and want 5K VGAs from NV or ATi you can ask whatever you want to.
And if the stuff you require is on the mid-end stuff, it is much more easier to do it :)
1) It has no crossfire but its not low profile, that makes no sense to me
2) GPU-Z is easily fakeable, and 3DMark results without pictures is BS
3) There's no way they would get a hold of a unreleased card that isn't a reference. (Why would they be using an ASUS this early?)
There's my two cents.
Edit1: Those ARE GDDR2 chips. Why would they use GDDR2? Sounds hoakey!
Edit2: It's just a flashed 3650...