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Bofferbrauer2 said:

The 4730 had just two problems: 1. Half the amount of ROPs compared to the 4770 and 4850. This limited the card sometimes, otherwise it was very good, and 2. It was very rare (at least here), so finding one was the main issue.

Yeah, I can remember the ACC. Tried it on my Athlon II X4 635 but sadly it didn't work, probably my cache was compromised so it couldn't be reactivated properly.

The only time the ROPS became an issue if when you started to throw lots of Anistropic filtering at games, the sampling just smashes ROPS.
Otherwise the Radeon 4730 could match or beat the 4830 in most Unreal Engine 3 powered games when no AA/AF is enabled.

Obviously buying a 4870 and overclocking that would give you the best results, especially at higher (1080P) resolutions thanks to it's superior fillrate.

It's hard to deny the banging value AMD had that GPU generation... Even their integrated graphics were brilliant, I recall having an Asrock A880G Extreme3 which had included 128MB of sideport memory/VRAM on the motherboard just for the integrated Radeon 4250 graphics.

I managed to push that integrated GPU past 1.3Ghz (More than double the stock) and zip-tied a small 40mm fan to the chipset to keep it cool... And even overclocked the integrated RAM by a modest amount... I had a Phenom 2 x4 960T which unlocked into a full-fledged Phenom 2 x6 chip... Was my main transcoding PC for streaming to my home theater for years.

Silicon lottery was definitely more prevalent back then on what results you could achieve, now tweaking of CPU's and GPU's is pretty much a pointless affair as they are designed to operate as high as they can right out of the box.

...But to also be fair, I miss the days of playing with jumper settings and playing with the clocks/busses/multipliers/dividers on motherboards to overclock my CPU's, external Cache chips, Ram and more. It's a lost art form now.