These top end graphics cards from both NVIDIA and ATI are becoming more and more expensive and with the current economic crisis, those two don't exactly go hand in hand. As an result, ATI came up with the Radeon HD 4770 with a price point of around $100 which should appeal to a much wider range of users. This card is also ATI's first to be manufactured using a 40nm manufacturing process and contains 826 million transistors, 640 shader processing cores and 512MB of GDDR5 memory. How well exactly will the Radeon HD 4770 be able to compete? Well, we just have an Sapphire Radeon HD 4770, so let's see how it shapes up and whether it can cause a drop in prices in competing video cards. - XSReviews

Sapphire Radeon HD 4770 512MB Video Style Review

Sapphire's packaging is usually vivid and flamboyant and there is no exception, the intricately detailed lady clad in an waistcoat and also heavily armed with dual pistols and a large samurai sword on her back, certainly packs a punch with the Sapphire logo adjacent. And the two black strips at the top and bottom designate that this is indeed the Radeon HD 4770 and a few of the more notable features are displayed at the top, such as the CrossFireX capabilities. The back is just as well styled albeit much more technical in that it outlines a whole sequence of features each with an accompanying image along with the product highlights.

Thier Radeon HD 4770 is noticeably smaller than many of the top-end graphics boards and the cooling solution is a little different then the reference design. The aluminium heatsink takes up just two expansion slots despite the front end only using up a single slot. This particular card uses an RV740 core with 640 shader cores and is also the first GPU core to use a 40nm process which comes the stock clocked at 750MHz. The card uses a bright red PCB and the rear does not contain any memory chips. In fact it is pretty plain with just the silver backplate of the heatsink and cooler combination, but that is just about all that is visible.

Clearly with our limited number of cards to test the Radeon HD 4770 against, the results were always going to favour the higher priced Radeon HD 4870 in about every single case. Moreover, we would expect the performance to beat the likes of the GeForce 9800 GT's and compete well with these GeForce GTS 250's. The pricing is very good and at just $100 a dual card configuration in CrossFire could be a great investment at a roughly similar price to the single Radeon HD 4870. The cooler used on this particular board does its job very well and keeps the card much cooler than many of the top end cards which tend to wade into the 90°C's.

Again if you are looking to cut down your electricity bill, these Radeon HD 4770's will keep the power consumption a whole lot lower. On the other hand, the card does not handle high levels of anti-aliasing well. For an performance boost, many enthusiasts turn to overclocking but unfortunately ATI have limited this somewhat to just 830/3400MHz which is a little disappointing. Overall though this latest ATI budget card has been a resounding success and we can't wait to see how a CrossFire setup performs. The great price point and reasonable performance all make for a very exciting card that is well worth a good look.