AMD Radeon HD 4770 512MB Review - World's First 40nm GPU

AMD Introduces the Radeon HD 4770 GPU

The new AMD Radeon HD 4770 GPU, previously known as the RV740 product, is AMD's updated offering for the $99-109 product segment. This GPU is significant not only because of its pricing and position, but because it is the first GPU to be manufactured on the 40nm process from either GPU vendor. That allows AMD to make the part cheap and power efficient.

 

 

 

 

AMD is aware that as the market demands have changed, with a slowing economy and the encroachment of the console into PC gaming's market share, the amount of money that PC gamers are willing to pay for a GPU has changed.  You can see in the graph on the right that by far the majority of GPUs sold are at $100 or less - there is another spike at the $300 price point for the enthusiast gamer crowd that is good to see. 
Obviously AMD is hoping the new Radeon HD 4770 will take over as the dominant product in the $99 segment. 

The Radeon HD 4770 is a dual-slot cooled card that runs at 750 MHz and includes GDDR5 memory support.  Of course, it helps to know WHAT exactly is running at 750 MHz, doesn't it?  The HD 4770 will sport 640 stream processors compared to the 800 stream processors on the HD 4800 series of cards; that is a 20% cut in shader power but the card still can pump out 960 GFLOPs of raw compute power.
AMD including GDDR5 memory on such a low cost product is also an interesting move - obviously GDDR3 would save them even more money but they feel that the extra memory bandwidth is required to keep the 640 shader cores fed efficiently. 

AMD is pitting the new HD 4770 against the NVIDIA GeForce 9800 GT though it does seem to fit BETWEEN the 9800 GT and GTS 250 (9800 GTX+) in terms of pricing - our testing will reflect that.  Here though AMD is pointing out the raw power advantages the HD 4770 has over the aging 9800 GT; while interesting it really all comes down to how the GPU performs in our coming game tests.

 

Pictures:

For a $99 part, the Radeon HD 4770 is actually a pretty big card: it's a dual-slot cooler design and is about the same size as the HD 4870.

The layout of the connections is uniform: two dual-link DVI outputs (each of which supports the DVI-to-HDMI adapters) and a single HDTV / dongle connection.

The HD 4770 continues to support not only CrossFire but CrossFire X that allows for as many as FOUR GPUs to be grouped together. 

This $100 graphics card will require a 6-pin PCIe power connection - this seems to be a trend continuing from both AMD and NVIDIA as of late.

Though the cooler on the new 40nm GPU is still big the actually heatsink and fins are modest in size and in weight - the 40nm GPU obviously doesn't need as much cooling power as the 55nm iterations seen in the HD 4800-series.

Taking the top off of the card reveals the RV740 GPU and GDDR5 memory at its heart.

Here you can see the 40nm part next to the ubiquitous quarter; the die shrink does result in a somewhat smaller die.

 

 

Card Comparisons and Testing Setup:

AMD Radeon HD 4770 512MB

ASUS NVIDIA GeForce 9800 GT 512MB

We are now moving away from Core 2 as our platform of choice and on to the world of Nehalem, the Core i7.  Our system is built around an Intel Core i7-920 2.67 GHz processor on an ASUS P6T6 WS Revolution motherboard that sports both the X58 chipset and the NVIDIA nForce 200 chipset with 4 full x16 PCIe 2.0 graphics slots should would test the extreme cases of GPU scaling.  6GB of Corsair DDR3-1600 memory are used as well and a PC Power and Cooling 1200 watt Turbo-Cool power supply keeps everything running 100% stable. 

Test System Setup

CPU

Intel Core i7-920 @ 2.67 GHz

Motherboards

ASUS P6T6 WS Revolution X58 + nForce 200

Memory

Corsair 3 x 2GB DDR3-1600

Hard Drive

Western Digital VelociRaptor 300GB

Sound Card

Sound Blaster Audigy 2 Value

Video Card

AMD Radeon HD 4770 512MB
AMD Radeon HD 4850 512MB
NVIDIA GeForce 9800 GT 512MB
NVIDIA GeForce GTS 250 1GB

Video Drivers

NVIDIA: 182.08
AMD: Catalyst Beta

Power Supply
PC Power and Cooling Turbo-Cool 1200w

DirectX Version

DX10 / DX9c

Operating System

Windows Vista Ultimate 64-bit

 

 

Our thanks go out to Corsair for the memory for our test bed, to PC Power and Cooling for the 1200w beast of a PSU for the system and to ASUS for the P6T6 WS Revolution motherboard.

• Call of Duty: World at War
• Crysis
• Far Cry 2
• Left 4 Dead
• World in Conflict 
• 3DMark Vantage

 

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