It is nothing new for video card manufacturers to attempt to improve upon already proven graphics cards. Though normally when these improvements are made the performance gain is marginal. But every once in a while a manufacturer comes out with a real gem of a product. And well, this Sapphire Radeon HD 4770 video card is one of these gems. In fact, ATI just took the liberty to come up with a mid-range product to reduce their manufacturing process and via that way they are able to proof it before they will start rolling out the big guns using the same technology. This is not at all a bad idea, as the mid-range segment brings in the most money and this should guarantee a flawless high-end product. - Bjorn3D

Sapphire Radeon HD 4770 (40nm) Video Style Review

The Radeon HD 4770 video card is using an entirely new fabrication process of 40nm. ATI left the memory interfacing at 128-bit, but like their Radeon HD 4870 cards, this graphics board is sporting the GDDR5 memory which doubles the effective memory bandwidth of previous GDDR3 memory. The GPU core of the Radeon HD 4770 has double the amount of shaders than the Radeon HD 4670 and 160 shaders less than the Radeon HD 4800 series. Their card comes in a nice box which is just as usual from Sapphire. The backside of the box has all of the general specifications and features of the Radeon HD 4770 edition.

Upon opening the inner box, we finally see what Sapphire included. The first thing we have is the instruction manual. Sapphire did a pretty good job on making sure the Radeon HD 4770 card would not get harmed during shipping. Not only they did a good job on the cardboard to keep it from shifting around, Sapphire put a anti-static bubble wrap around the video card itself. This card does not really use a large full coverage heatsink we have been accustomed to. And the Radeon HD 4770 version only needs the use of one PCI Express 6-pin power plug, which already indicates the low power consumption aspect of the new 40nm process.

The Sapphire Radeon HD 4770 performance was not at all what we were really expecting. Normally, when we think about mid-range video cards, we would think they are the bottom of the barrel and will only play our games at a bare minimum settings. And this was not the case with the Radeon HD 4770 graphics card. It not only managed to play games at a decent frame rate, it managed to do so with high graphics settings and also with a decent widescreen resolution. Now where things turn to the worst with this video card was when we started to apply anti-aliasing. That's when the Radeon HD 4770 was brought to its knees.

Having a limited memory of 512MB is one of the reasons of this significant drop of frame rates. Another reason is the driver needs some serious updating. For a graphics card that costs less than $100, this Sapphire Radeon HD 4770 is an affordable buy for anyone who is needing a solid performing graphics card that does not want to make too many sacrifices on visual quality. And in this case, the only real sacrifice that would have just to be made was with the anti-aliasing settings on the various game titles.