Introduction

Early in February we had the opportunity to show you a sneak preview of the now final product that we are testing today. The Radeon HD series 4700. Slated for a launch in late April, that article opened up a lot of eyes.

See, ATI lately is aggressive in it's product line-up, constantly adding and shifting their products, forcing their products and competition to become faster, yet cheaper. And that's just great news for us as consumers isn't it?

Today, we have another bang for buck product, a product that I like very much. As what ATI is doing today is pretty remarkable. They are releasing the Radeon HD 4770, a mainstream product at a budget price. Trust me when I say that after reading this review, you will be impressed. And here's the three step plan that ATI applied to the Radeon HD 4770:

Step one, ATI shifted the GPU fabrication to a 40nm node. The result is a product that is smaller and uses less current. With that fact in mind, you can often increase clock frequency. Then compensate heat with a dual-slot cooler, and take it up yet another notch.

Step two was to use an ASIC design based off the RV770 (Radeon HD 4850 / 4870), as such this product comes with a full 640 shader processor setup.

Three, arm the graphics card with high frequency gDDR5 memory. And while the bus width is 128-bit, they used gDDR5 and doubled up that missing bandwidth again.

Then end result, features and performance wise, is a product that roughly equals the Radeon HD 4850. And at a MSRP of 99 USD that surely does not suck. And mind you that is specifically the starting MSRP here, as we can certainly expect this product to fall towards ~80 USD / 75 EUR in e-tail in the weeks to come.

So without further ado, let's review the final product this time, the Radeon HD 4770... mainstream performance, at a budget price. Next page please.