Sapphire HD 4770 PCIe Graphics Card Review

Codenamed RV740, the HD4770 is ATI’s latest GPU that’s manufactured using TSMC’s 40 nanometer fabrication process. While most other chips adopt the 55nm process, AMD have seen fit to test the water with their new chip in the highly competitive budget/performance sector of the graphics card market. A smaller fabrication had benefits that enable the chip to be produced at a smaller cost with the added benefit of consuming less power. Because less power is used, less heat is produced which allows the chip to be clocked higher than before. While I won’t go to far into the intricacies of the actual differences between the RV770 and the new RV740, I will say that the chip, at first glance anyway appears to be a slightly scaled down version of the RV770 (used in the 4800 range). There are however a few subtle differences.

The HD4770 has had it’s memory interface cut in half from 4×64bit (256bit) to 2×64bit (128bit). This lower interface has however been countered with the use of GDDR5 running at a blistering 800MHz which transfers data at twice the rate as GDDR3. Ultimately the memory bandwidth is therefore not affected too much by the reduction in interfaces. The stock GPU clockspeed is also slightly higher than the HD4850, running at 750MHz which might go some way for making up the lost ground in memory bandwidth and shaders compared to the 4850. To muddy the waters further, the HD4830 has higher memory bandwidth (As it too uses the 256bit interface) but has lower texel filtering and pixel fill rates. Sadly we don’t have a HD4830 to include in today’s review but on paper, the 4770 has it beat in all categories but memory bandwidth.