AMD Releasing Radeon HD 7730 At $50?

A lot of the PC Master Race are beginning to ramp up their interest in upgrading their rigs, while home entertainment bipartisans look on in interest, gauging whether they should go with a PC or a home console during the upcoming start of the new generation. Well, AMD could be making the decision between choosing a console or a PC, a heck of a lot easier with their budget-priced GPU, the Radeon HD 7730, which is rumored to start at the $50 price tag, a huge jump down from the 7990 Malta's $1,000 mark.

According to Xbitlabs, they managed to get the first image of the supposed 7730 from Coolaler.com, which depicts a small but viable GPU that is about on par to the Radeon HD 6670, in terms of raw processing power.

In the language of the fanboy Console War, that would effectively put the 7730 a minor step ahead of the PS4's APU theoretically. However, as indicated in the test threads from Coolaler, the 7730 actually has Vantage scores that rival and outdo the PS4 nicely if paired with a fast enough processor. If the 7730's entry price is $50, though, that's not that bad a deal at all, as you would still be able to play all the latest games, on moderately high settings. The card is expected to have a 128bit memory bus, and starting clock speeds of 800mhz. The only downfall would be the measly 1GB of GDDR5 VRAM.

You could, however, effectively build a very good running PC with the Radeon HD 7730 for under $300 if you could get a small micro-ATX case, a first generation quad-core and a 100GB HD or so. $38 worth of RAM and you should at least be able to play all the latest games on the basic to medium-high settings, plus video editing, word processing, media streaming and all the other lovely things that come along with owning a PC.

AMD has yet to comment on the Radeon HD 7730, though, and it might be an all right card bundled into a cost-effective unit, perhaps as the low-end version of the Steam Box? A competitive $250 PC rocking a 7730 and Steam's Big Picture Mode could easily put a huge dent in the sales appeal for the PS4 and next-generation Xbox.