If you have read my post on 8800GT overclocking below, I was pretty happy to get about 13.5% boost of performance with voltage mod on my card for a final score of 5,884 on Vantage. Well, after my experience with the 4770, that score don't look too great anymore haha
4770 Default Specs (from Newegg) :
Model
Brand POWERCOLOR
Model AX4770 512MD5-M
Interface
Interface PCI Express 2.0 x16
Chipset
Chipset Manufacturer ATI
GPU
Radeon HD 4770
Core Clock 750MHz
Stream Processors 640 Stream Processing Units
Memory
Memory Clock 800MHz
Memory Size 512MB
Memory Interface 128-bit
Memory Type GDDR5
Ports
HDMI 1 (via Adapter)
DVI 2
TV-Out
DDTV Out
General
Max Resolution 2560 x 1600
CrossFire Supported Yes
Cooler With Fan
Power Connector 6 Pin
Dual-Link DVI Supported Yes
HDCP Ready Yes
Manufacturer Warranty
Parts 2 years limited
Labor 2 years limited
Straight up on first try with everything at stock, the 4770 easily clocked in a score of 6,693! That is easily 800 points higher than my over-volted + over-clocked 8800GT :(
And that was with value RAM and mid-range P43 motherboard! Haih...
To think I had to tweak and try so many things and couldn't even get close to the 6,000 mark. This card just did it without any effort at all and as we know, the 4770 has been known to be a good overclocker. Though heartbroken at my own 8800GT as I was, there's still excitement to see how high we can get this card to go.
AMD cards are different from NVidia cards in the sense that they do not have Shader frequency for you to tweak. Its all just about the Core and Memory frequencies to increase the card's potential. AMD was gracious enough to include an overclocking tool together with their driver installation package. So I pushed the card to 790/840 and saw a healthy increase of ~200points. Nice.
However, noticed that there some missing frames during the Vantage run so decided to go with a little lower memory clock (I don't GDDR5s need to have clocks anyways with their huge bandwidth) but compensate back with a higher Core clock. Missing frames were reduced but the scores also took a dip but not by very much. Stability is much more important than high frames with constant crashing I would say. So this is what I settled for in the end.
I think there is much more potential in this card. Even at the overclocked setpoints, noise was very much under control and the temperature can be considered low with the stock cooling. I just didn't want to destroy my friend's brand new card within the first month so cannot tell what is it's absolute limit yet. But to anybody that is considering buying a low cost solid card that should easily last you a couple of years, this is really the choice to go with unless you can find a 4850 at RM400 or lower which would be even better.
So, sad day for me today as I watch another new card beat my 8800GT through both price and performance. But that did not stop me from finishing Devil May Cry 4 at all the max settings...twice! :)
Those who haven't played it, seriously go try it.
