With a new 40-nanometer manufacturing process behind it, AMD announced the ATI Radeon HD 4770 3D graphics chip this morning. Available now on 3D cards starting at $109 (before a $10 online rebate), the Radeon HD 4770 is the first 3D chip built on the 40-nanometer process, which allows for faster, more power-efficient hardware than AMD's previous 55nm chips.
AMD's new double-wide Radeon HD 4770 graphics card goes for only $109.
(Credit: AMD)The various enthusiast review sites found the 512MB Radeon HD 4770 fast enough to play most current games at lower resolutions and image quality settings. Think 1,680 x 1,050 or lower and with little-to-no anti-aliasing. The Radeon HD 4770 also outpaced Nvidia's $95 GeForce 9800 GT on almost every test, and competed well with the approximately $130 Geforce 250 GTS (aka the GeForce 9800 GTX+). Its power consumption seems to stand out mostly under load, but its idle results showed little benefit.
If this new card delivers on performance, we still find it interesting that the boxed versions of the card from Gigabyte, Sapphire, and Powercolor each have a bulky fan bolted onto the chip. Each card will thus require the space of two expansion card slots inside a desktop (affectionately referred to as "double-wides").Traditionally, $99 cards have been single-slot designs, making them perfect for adding to smaller desktops or PCs with several other expansion cards. It seems that with the decline of dedicated sound cards, the 3D graphics card is making a PC land grab.
We hope to be able to get to a review of the Radeon HD 4770 (along with the other new 3D cards and CPUs we've missed), but we have a lab full of desktops at the moment, and more on the way. Until we clear the decks (August?), we suggest you check out the following enthusiast sites for in-depth reviews of AMD's new card:
On Wednesday, we wrote that we'd published reviews of two high-end PC graphics cards: Nvidia's GeForce GTX 295, and what we thought at the time was the Asus EAHD4870X2 TOP, an overclocked card using ATI's Radeon HD 4870X2 dual-chip design. We learned Thursday morning that the Asus card we thought we had is actually something else.
As found on the Asus Web site, here is a picture of the standard clocked edition of its $479 EAHD4870X2 graphics card:
(Credit:
Asus)
Also on that same site, a picture of the $550 overclocked version:
(Credit:
Asus)
Finally, here's what showed up in our lab:
(Credit:
CNET)
Turns out, despite all outward appearances, the card we received was not, in fact, overclocked. Instead, it's the standard edition, at 750MHz clock speed per core. AMD says it sent us the Asus-branded, ready-for-retail packaged version, but we're unclear as to why the fan and heatsink assembly is so different than what Asus has on display. If you've purchased the standard clocked edition yourself, we'd be interested to know what came in your box.
The reviews (Asus now here, competing GeForce GTX 295 here) have since been corrected, although our assessment stays the same. We still recommend the Nvidia GeForce GTX 295 card over the Asus card, or any other with ATI's Radeon HD4870 X2 design. The standard version may be $479, down from the $550 overclocked model, but it's still slower and more power-hungry than the GTX 295, which costs just $20 more. You can also bet we'll be running GPU-Z on all 3D cards from here on to confirm their clock speeds.
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