| Sapphire Radeon HD 4770 |
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| Written by Jeff_Tom | ||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
| Monday, 11 May 2009 20:12 | ||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
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.
Sapphire includes everything you need to get started in their bundle including component video output cables, DVI-to-VGA adapter, HDMI-to-DVI adapter, molex 6-pin PCI-E power adapter, as well as Cyberlink PowerDVD and DVD Suite and a Crossfire connector.
Here's a comparison to other ATI cards on the market.
Here's our test system.
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.
At 1680x1050 Crossfire basically does nothing and the 4770 again comes in just under the 4850. At 1920x1200 it is on top barely ahead of the 4850 and finally at 2560x1600 it leads the pack at 67.8. Sapphire's 4770 however is more than playable at 44.5 fps and faster than the overclocked 9800 GT.
Crossfire sees more of a gain in Unreal Tournament 3, easily cleaning up here. The 4770 suffers more here from lack of stream processors and doesn't gain much from the extra memory bandwidth until you hit 2560x1600.
Left4Dead shows a pretty nice gain in Crossfire and again the Sapphire 4770 does a great job fully playable up to the highest resolution possible today, 2560x1600. Crossfire does gain you though an extra 17fps.
3DMark is synthetic so I wouldn't put much into it but Futuremark's benchmarks are quite popular. The 4770 seems to follow a similar pattern as to the game tests coming in under the 4850.
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.
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.
As we mentioned in our original 4770 review, the card appeared to be much more overclockable than the Catalyst Control Center Overdrive function would allow. There is a hack out now where if you add this line in the config file of the latest RivaTuner, "RV770 = 9440h-9443h,944Ch,94B3h", you can use it with RivaTuner and overclock to your heart's desire. We topped out stable overclock at 865MHz for the core and 982MHz for the memory. This is a 110MHz core overclock and 182MHz overclock for the memory, an amazing overclock. This increased our Left4Dead score at 1680x1050 from 51.7 to 68.1. That easily tops the Radeon HD 4850 graphics card. We do wish ATI would just open up overclocking in CCC for simplicity as this hacked RivaTuner is not the preferable way to do so. Otherwise though, CCC is great.
Conclusion: It is hard to imagine not only 3-4 years ago but last year getting this much performance out of a sub-$100 card but ATI has done it and Sapphire has done a great job with their Sapphire Radeon HD 4770. A quality bundle, and good price mean this card is a no-brainer and finally a sub-$100 card no gamer would be embarrassed to have. And with a little overclocking, you can get much faster performance than even a Radeon HD 4850! This makes this card basically perfect in addition to lower power consumption gained from the 40nm manufacturing process. Pricing: You can pick up the Sapphire card now shipped free for $100. Score: 99%
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