Introduction

The Graphics Card market is one which has taken some real beatings in the past year with the economic crisis. Instead of blowing your pay cheque as soon as it lands in your hand, many people are being more cautious about their purchases, making sure it’s not money wasted and that you’ve got the best performance for your hard earned cash. This is great for review websites like us, but for ATI and Nvidia it’s a very different story. Instead of taking a step forward in developing a bigger, better and usually more expensive card, which is normally the case, they’ve taken a leap backwards to provide for the ever-increasing ‘budget market’.

One such graphics card from ATI to enter this market is the HD 4770. Although it’s not the newest of graphics cards on the block and by no means the fastest, for users who are looking to spend under £100 on a video card, its features and specifications mean it’s one of the top candidates when deciding what graphics card to purchase.

Today we have an ATI HD4770 to review from the popular company named HIS. HIS are one of the leading manufacturers of ATI graphics cards. To see how this budget monster performs, we’ll be comparing it to a card just £20 more expensive. Time to see how this RV740 GPU video card performs…

The Technology behind the card…

Whereas most graphics cards feature a 55nm GPU, the 4770 HD from ATI is built with a 40nm chip. The smaller manufacturing process used to create this GPU means that more transistors can be fitted inside the same sized piece of silicon. In fact, to be precise, the RV740 has 826 million in a 143mm chip whereas the RV770 55nm chip has 965 million in a 267mm chip. Quite some size difference! So what does all this mean? The main advantage is significantly reduced power consumption and greater clock speeds, it only takes 80W to power a 4770.

There’s an interesting entry which shows the benefits of increasing transistor count here.

About HIS

“HIS is an internationally acclaimed graphics cards company. Time and time again, HIS were compared and tested by hundreds of worldly renowned critics. The results are phenomena, HIS have proven to offer far superior, cooler, quieter, and faster graphic cards than any other leading rivals. Up to the fourth quarter of 2008, HIS has won over 700 awards with ATI graphic solution from major media worldwide. HIS is being recognized by providing performance leading and award-winning products.”

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