Sapphire Radeon HD 4770

   There's no peace treaty in the graphics card wars as Nvidia has had problems topping ATI and now ATI has released their biggest bang for the buck video card since the Radeon 4850 last summer in the Radeon HD 4770. Today we have one of these cards to look at from Sapphire which we'll put through it's paces.     The heatsink is a little different from the one the media received, not quite as large covering the entire graphics card and a somewhat 2001, futuristic modeling to the heatsink and fan combination. Given how cool the 4770 ran it did seem overkill a bit and likely the 4770's we received were more engineering samples and not quite final hardware.     The Sapphire card we're loooking at isn't overclocked and doesn't deviate too far from the standard spec. In case you're not up to speed on the Radeon HD 4770's specs the card features 640 stream processors, which is similar to the Radeon HD 4830 but has 512MB of GDDR5 like the Radeon 4870 and Radeon 4890. We'll see how this performs later on in benchmarks.     Additionally the card is built on a new 40nm process as opposed to the 55nm graphics card process all cards use today. It is the first card to use the 40nm process and is actually lower than even any processors on the market right now. It is the first card though so likely we won't see all the benefits until the next-generation of this process. Other than that, most of the major features of the Radeon 4000 series are here, UVD2 for H.264 decoding, DX 10.1, PCI-Express 2.0 support, DVD upscaling, HDMI with 7.1 audio, and advanced PowerPlay management. Here's a comparison to other ATI cards on the market.   ATI Radeon 4770 ATI Radeon 4850 ATI Radeon 4830 ATI Radeon 4890 ATI Radeon 4670 Stream Processors 640 800 640 800 320 Core Clock 750MHz 625MHz 575MHz 850MHz 750MHz Memory Clock 800MHz GDDR5 1GHz GDDR3 900MHz GDDR3 975MHz GDDR5 1GHz GDDR3 Manufacturing 40nm 55nm 55nm 55nm 55nm               Here's our test system.   Mother Board Foxconn 790GX CPU Phenom II X3 720BE Memory Corsair XMS 6GB Hard Drive Western Digital SE 16 750GB Case Tsunami Thermaltake Display Samsung SyncMaster 30"   Our test system OS was Windows Vista Ultimate 64-bit SP1 with 9.4 ATI Catalyst drivers from ATI 182.50 NForce drivers from Nvidia. AMD is aiming at the 9800 GT with this card so that and the previously popular 9600 GT is what we'll be comparing against. Also keep in mind that our 9800 GT is overclocked like many of Nvidia's cards while our 4770 is not. We also added another 4770 to test Crossfire ability of this card.     We don't see a major change with the 4770 in Crossfire with Crysis' being more CPU bound but we do see some amazing number out of the Sapphire Radeon HD 4770 almost matching the 4850.     Next we'll look at the latest Call of Duty game, World at War. Again we see the 4770 is just below a 4850 however unlike Crysis the Nvidia cards performance is much, much lower. Switching things from Call of Duty, here our 9800 GT appears to perform quite well while our 4770 suffers and our 4850 is on top for a moment. It appears with UT3 prefers stream processors in numbers until you get to such a high resolution that memory bandwidth kicks in.   Left4Dead is Valve's latest game and very popular as with everything they put out. Here we see the 4770 lag behind the 4850 until we hit 2560x1600 where the GDDR5 memory shows it's benefit. The 9800 GT OC and 9600 GT remain slower.   3DMark is synthetic benchmark so I wouldn't put much into it but here's some potential of these graphics cards.   Power consumption was measured from the wall socket directly from the computer. Idle was taken after 5 minutes into the Windows desktop and Load was tested emphasizing gaming performance and the video card in Crysis' GPU demo.   Idle Load ATI Radeon 4770 134W 192W ATI Radeon 4850 144W 215W GeForce 9600 GT 137W 203W GeForce 9800 GT OC 142W 209W For 40nm power consumption is a little higher than we'dlike but still 23W lower at load than a 4850 which it is almost as fast as. Overclocking the card was a breeze with ATI's Catalyst drivers. We maxed them out as far as the Catalyst control panel would allow to 830MHz core and 850MHz memory. While the drivers overclock excellently and it is quite easy to do the problem is it is very conservative! To a fault, the card was running cool and could probably go much higher with this dual slot cooler easily. We wish this would go higher and allow you to truly push things like AMD's Overdrive software. Conclusion: It's frankly amazing what type of performance you can get these days for $100. While ATI expects the cards to be around $109 there should be rebates dropping it to $99. So for $99 you can max out most of the PC games out today up to 1920x1200 and some to 2560x1600 resolution. Clearly not Crysis and a few others but what you can is nothing short of fantastic. As far as the 40nm process we think it's still a little early but it is good to see ATI pushing forward with this and topping out Nvidia again. Overall it seems to offer much better performance for less or similar pricing, with more advanced tech with DX 10.1. Frankly it isn't much more to go for a 4870 at this point which might have longevity but a 4770 is an amazing card for the price and comes with no hesitation of recommendation. Pricing:We don't see the card at e-tailers yet but a Radeon 4850 can be had for $128. Score: 99%  '); //-->

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Tags: crossfire ddr3 gddr5 geforce hd46x0 hd4870 hd4850 hd4890 hdmi nforce overclocking phenom radeon hd4770 vista 3dmark