ASUS has long been considered one of the top manufacturers of all kinds of PC components, and it comes as no surprise that they have decided to make their own cooler for the brand new ATI Radeon HD 4770. They have called this board the Formula edition. ASUS being the big company they are, have paid a lot of attention to detail on the heatsink design. With this larger heatsink comes lower temperatures. Surely ASUS geared this board for the mid-range graphics card buyer who is looking to gain some performance by overclocking. Just one look at the Radeon HD 4770 specs is enough to say the card is the perfect card to play all the latest games at decent settings without breaking the bank. - Bjorn3D

ASUS Radeon HD 4770 Formula Cooling Style Review

Surely with the ability to cool these video cards better will lead to a higher overall overclock, thus increasing the cards performance even more. This is stacking up to be a tight competiton between this card, and its other ATI siblings, the Radeon HD 4670 and Radeon HD 4850. ATI makes a large claim by saying they have the fastest card in the $100 range. The GeForce 9600 GT board which falls in about the same spot looks to be pretty comparable. The dual slot design should help temperatures though, which means manufacturers could take advantage of that and release higher clocked cards which in return bring greater performance.

We usually start will a nice shot of the packaging, but ASUS decided to send us this sample in a plain cardboard box. Expect the packaging to be similar to other cards in this price segment, so you can be sure that it will be protected, but not as much so as say a GeForce GTX 295 would be. Now ASUS has made just an interesting top assembly for this card. If you look at it in just the right way, so you will see that it resembles a Formula One race car. We give props to ASUS for designing a really sweet looking card. Even their fan has an interesting fin design for the blower which is actually nicely integrated as a whole.

We came into this article not knowing what to expect from the Radeon HD 4770, but after it all, we feel that this is a great new addition to the ATI lineup. The card itself performed almost up to the Radeon HD 4850, usually loosing out in higher resolutions due to its lower bandwidth, but really the card did great. most likely someone who will pick up this GPU is going to be using a 22inch LCD monitor or smaller, so they will be using a mid-range widescreen resolution or less. Running at this resolution, this Radeon HD 4770 is simply unbeatable for the price, which is really something to take into account when buying a new graphics card.

Not only will this Radeon HD 4770 be able to play all the latest games, it should have no trouble playing them at or near maximum settings. As far as the ASUS Formula version of the card, we have mixed feelings. While this may just be our computer, the overclocking really put a big downer on this cards parade. Then on top of that the fact that the card decided to stop working was also unexpected. We did try it in another computer and it worked perfectly, so we are confident it just freaked out. With these oddities aside, the Formula edition has a heatsink that was designed with the utmost care, looks awesome while performing great.

We don't think we have ever seen a card designed with this much detail. The one downside to this is the ditching of the normal heatsink air flow design. Instead of venting all of the graphics cards heat outside of the case, these Formula edition throws it around inside the case. Though other than this small defect, the cooling solution on this card is rock solid.