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.

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.