Graphics for the Recession - ATI Radeon HD 4770
Temperature, Power Consumption and Overclocking
Temperature
We ran the the Radeon HD 4770 at load for half an hour and we found that its operating temperature at load was a manageable 70 degrees Celsius, just about on par with the NVIDIA GeForce 9800 GT. However, given that it features a 40nm GPU, we had expected better. Perhaps its true potential will be realized once vendors start putting customized coolers on it. Bear in mind here that the Gigabyte GeForce GTS 250 has a customized Zalman cooler, which explains its low, low reading.
Power Consumption
ATI states that the Radeon HD 4770 has a rated TDP of 80W and our findings confirm that. With a maximum reading of 203W at load, this meant that it was roughly about 10% more efficient than the GeForce 9800 GT and that figure rises to 20% when compared against the Radeon HD 4850.
Overclocking
The Radeon HD 4770 was an eager overclocker. Using Catalyst Control Center, we successfully pushed the card to the maximum it would allow, 830MHz at the core and 3400MHz DDR at the memory. This gave us about a 10% boost in performance on 3DMark Vantage.