An RV introduction
It's not exactly a secret that for companies like ATI and NVIDIA it is hard to keep the rumor mill under control. It was early January this year already that certain details surfaced on this lovely wise web hinting about the fact that ATI was working on 40nm products. Weeks later another rumor surfaced, some 40nm products should be arriving in the April/May timeframe and among the new products would be a chipset that carries product codename (ASIC name) RV740, slated as the first 40nm release. And that's interesting all by itself.
Now .. the technology industry works in mysterious ways and a pre-production model, slash prototype RV740 board to Guru3D.com arrived at our office a couple of days ago.
Not being tied to an NDA, without further ado, lets meet and greet with that RV740 graphics chipset. RV740 is positioned somewhere in the upper segment of budget level products. We are sure this product is going to be cheaper than 99 USD / 89 EUR. And considering where the product is targeted in the market, ATI is pulling a rabbit out the hat with a head the size of an elephant.
Why? What can you expect? Well, from what we see... performance is really close to the performance level of a Radeon HD 4850. So meanwhile others are re-labeling and reinserting their products at a new price point, ATI is moving forward with more interesting steps. Smaller die-size, more shader processors (compared to RV730), oh and that life-size rabbit I just mentioned... it's GDDR5 memory.
We are going to bring you guys a nice little sneak preview of what ATI is working on. Let me clearly state, nothing in this review is finalized or can be seen as a concluding fact, the specifications (clock frequencies) and configurations might change for all we know. We are testing an early engineering sample here. It will however be a pretty good assessment of what ATI is going to release somewhere in April.
You guys ready? Let's meet the RV740, and though we don't know it's real name just yet, allow us to call this product the Radeon HD 4750 for the ease of understanding, product placement and well... the sake of the most logical name for this product, mmhh okay? Next page please.
