4770 Benched and OCed

Finally got to do some 3DMark Vantage on SC's build.

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.

SC's Build

My department has a habit of giving out 'free' Intel CPUs to it's employees for the purpose that we get to feel more connected to the products we work on (I so hope they will give out a Larrabee! Haha). We know it as the Beta Unit Program and this time, we are all getting Q9550 (2.8Ghz) Yorkfield processors. Great job hoh? (More like softening us up so that they can squeeze more life force from you everyday to do work haha)

One of my colleague, JG went down during the long weekend/Agong's Birthday public holiday to KL LowYat to help himself and another colleague pick up items for their PC build. He was planning to get the new Radeon 4770 card and plan to CF in the future and I thought he made a pretty good choice.

However, I did not know that LowYat traders practiced this kind of business attitude: He was told by X shop's person that they will not be selling new stock of the 4770s as it is affecting the other product's stock movement. He was then forced to get the alternative Radeon 4830. I mean, customers are getting forced to pay more for less performance here for the sake of profit. The 4770 they were selling was not exactly selling under priced at RM399 since AMD did launched the 4770 initially at USD109.99 or RM384 after all. What should have happened was they should have dropped the prices of the current cards since they do perform weaker to the 4770. I know doing business is not easy and every possible profit margin should be pursued but man I'm disappointed. Telling people the whole of LowYat not one single 4770. Just my two cents.

Anyways, I got the item and price list from JG, took a look, and was telling another colleague (SC) that was also interested to build his own PC with the beta unit that if he was OK, I could help him out to do his. SC agreed and I suggested to JG that once we were done (his was still missing the OS at the moment), we could do benchmarks to see which build ended up better just for the fun of it :P. Just throwing in a challenge to make things alittle bit more exciting (I could always cheat by OC-ing some parts hehe). Budget will be a RM1,500 total without keyboard/mouse/speakers/LCD. Windows 7 will be the OS.

Without delay, let me introduce the contenders *ding ding ding*

JG's Build
Gigabyte P45 UD3L Motherboard
2x2GB Kingston DDR2 800Mhz
Seagate 500GB 7200rpm Hard Disk
Sapphire 4830 512MB GDDR3
CoolerMaster 460W RealPower PSU
CoolerMaster ATX Casing (dunno which and have not seen it yet)
Stock shaped Intel LGA775 CPU cooler
LG 22x IDE DVD-RW

Total Price : RM1,520


SC's Build
Asus P5Q Pro P43 Motherboard
2x2GB Kingston DDR2 800Mhz
Western Digital Caviar Green 500GB 7200rpm Hard Disk
PowerColor 4770 512MB GDDR5 (PC Depot had stock!)
CoolerMaster 460W RealPower PSU
PowerLogic Quatro 200 Casing (Free 460W PSU but no 12V rail or 6pin for graphic card)

CoolerMaster X Dream4 LGA775 Cooler
Liteon 22X Sata DVD-RW
CoolerMaster 460W RealPower PSU

Total Price: RM1,478


OK, some reasons and comments on my choices. Mainly the difference between the two builds is the motherboard and graphic card. From the budget, it was pretty obvious that CF ready mobo is going to cost too much. A CF ready P45 mobo will cost aboout RM500 (cheapest was Asus P5Q Pro P45 for RM489 @ PCDepot) and you will then be forced to break the budget to get the 4770s. Since CF is out of the question, there is no point to get a P45 board anymore. A P43 board is basically a P45 board with 1 less PCIE x16 lane and is still equally as capable as the P45 in all other aspects. This allowed me to save about RM70 and it was then well placed into the more expensive but better performing 4770.

I also chosed ASUS due to the many motherboard feature it supported including it's Quick Boot feature that allows you to enter into a ASUS mini OS with internet browsing capabilities in 5secs! The Asus mobo also came with BIOS protection and offered alot of overclocking capabilities and settings.

On to the build! Counting this time, it would be my 4th time configuring and building a PC for me or someone else but this will be the first time I'm documenting it hehe. Hope I get this right and pardon for the blur photos. Took it with my Nokia 5800 cos too poor for DSLRs :(

The traditional lay-out-everything-on-the-floor-and-take-a-picture lol:


ASUS P5Q Pro P43 Motherboard. 6x SATA and 1 IDE cable. Too bad it's a brownish color for the PCB. Black would've been perfect but rare to find in midrange mobos. However, I did find a mATX with black PCB before. The ASUS P5KPL-AM, a pretty nice G31 board.

The new Radeon 4770

With the space ship designed cooler :S

It was pretty much a nice build. The casing was a big surprise. For the price of Rm105, it really felt well made and even the plastic front did not feel cheap. The paint job on the side panels was also very well done and the aluminium-like insides gave it a slightly classier look. At one point I was complaining to SC that this cheap casing does not even provide screws or PCB stands. We actually went on to impovised and screwed the mobo on anyways with whatever screws we could find until we saw the packet of screws/PCB stands tied together with the supplied power cable that came with the case (the casing comes with a PSU ready remember?). OMG!! Should've noticed that much earlier! Anyways, my apologies to the PowerLogic casing. sorry if I hurted your feelings. I will learn to respect cheap casings from now on haha.

Completed build:

The idle temp as seen from BIOS was about 55C which is a little too high if you ask me. Thinking to replace the exhaust fan with a 120mm, add a 120mm intake at the front and a 80mm at the side panel directly moving air towards the processor area. The pleasent surprise was the system was pretty quiet. The 4770 boots up with 100% fan speed and then lowers down to nearly an inaudible level after that. So far so good.

Since there is still the OS to install so stay tuned for the bechmark results much later. I'll probably run 3dMark Vantage and some game FRAPS and will try to post up by this week. I'll also do some cable tie management for the cables and post up a few more pics. It's still an ugly jungle right now. Do you think I made the correct choices? Let me know! :)

P.S. Thanks to SC for allowing me to spend his money for him. Hope you like your new PC!

Best value for money graphic cards

I know for a fact the majority of the PC users these days do not go for the highest end graphic card they can find when they are making a new build. There are many of us that are looking for a solid card while not hurting our bank too much. Of course there are always those with deep pockets and are looking for bragging rights for the highest framerates possible in Crysis but I'll leave that for another topic. At the end of the day, both NVidia and AMD knows that the mainstream market is where the highest sales will be registered.

Note that although these cards are grouped in the mainstream market, I consider them to be of the higher mainstream portion as these cards can get you the magic 30 frames minimum in Crysis for 1280X1024 so do not underestimate them!

NVidia 8800GT 512MB

I did my first build in 2007. I bought the NVidia 8800GT card which was just launched at that time and I have yet to find a game I cannot play today at 1280X1024 with all high details with it. I remembered it costed me RM860 at that time. It was still considered a very good buy due to its price to performance ratio that no other card could beat. It was able to give nearly 8800GTX performance while priced 50% cheaper than it. It also consumed less power due to its new G92 core. At that time, you just could not ask for more.

Radeon 4850 512MB

Then we had the new Radeon 4800 cards, the Radeon 4850 and 4870. While the 4870 is still considered the high-end card (a new 1GB version has been introduced now) even till now, the 4850 was unchalleged as the new bang for buck champion. But the impact it made was not as impressive as when the 8800GT first launched. This was because the gains 4850 have over the 8800GT was not much after considereing the card is priced slightly higher that the 8800gt. It will make alot of difference only for new upgraders (from older hardware) or people looking for a new build as Crossfire was also a big factor to consider. SLI was proprietry to NVidia at that time and the efficiency of the Core 2 processors by Intel meant more people owned Intel motherboards that only support CF. You could consider the 4850 as the first card from AMD/ATI that could challenge the value for money previously held by NVidia.

Radeon 4770 512MB GDDR5

At present, we have a new attempt by AMD/ATI to hold on to the king of price vs performance crown from , the Radeon 4770. This is the world's first 40nm card combined with 512MB of very fast Qimonda GDDR5 memory (The only other card with GDDR5 is the 4870). The card has a memory bus of 128bits which is pretty low but compensation from the GDDR5's larger bandwidth compared to GDDR3s makes the actual bandwidth offered comparable to 256bit cards. The 4770 is targetted at the low cost HTPC market as well as the everyday gamer. It launched with a price of USD109.99 and can be found in LowYat for as low as RM350 each which is pretty awesome. The closest competitor from NVidia from pricepoint perspective is the 9600GT but there is actually no competition when looking at the benchmark results :). 

The 8800gt has sinced been refreshed as the current 9800GT with slightly better performance and the price has dropped 50% (you can easily find one for about RM400+ these days! OMG!!). The 4850s are also hovering in the RM400 price zones as well. As you can see, the economic situation does have an impact to the PC world. You can today get the same performance levels as 2 yrs back for 50% less cost. 

The 4770 performs generally between the 4850 and the new 9800GT(RM100 more expensive) with the 4850 at the front. But when overclocking comes into play, which is very much the forte of the 4770 due to its 40nm fab process and dual slot cooling (which I think is an overkill), it easily surges ahead of both the cards and even the 9800GTX at some games. However, cranking the resolution up to 1080p, it falls back to its place behind the higher memory equipped 9800GTX but still maintained its lead over the 4850 and 9800GT. AMD/ATI is doing really well!

Anybody wants to take my 8800GT? It has voltage mod jumpers :)

I want to get 2 of these in CF in my PC, water cool them and just push and push the core clocks