mytechisland

Asus ATI Radeon EAH4770 Formula
Reviewed by Poldopunk, official hardware reviewer of mytechisland.



One of the most sought-after graphics card in the world is the ATI Radeon HD 4770 because of its price to performance ratio. Let’s face it, not many people can afford the likes of 4890, 4870, or even the 4850. Usually, entry-level to mainstream users are limited to a 500-watt power supply which means upgrading would entail another cost not to mention the fact that these upper echelon cards generate a lot of heat, and yet again, another upgrade into your system that you would need to look into. The 4770 is a gift from AMD to entry-level to mainstream users and today, we are looking at how Asus packages AMD’s gift.
Before we start checking out the card, let’s review the specifications of the 4770 pitted against Nvidia’s offering; the 8800GT/9800GT and the 9600GT. Yes, the 4770 is targeted against these two green cards that have already established a name for themselves when it comes to price over performance ratio. On top of the 4770, we have the legendary G92 chip, the 9800GT; below it is the 9600GT.

From the table alone you can clearly see that this card is something unique. In fact, it is the world’s first 40nm GPU which promises less power consumption and obviously, lesser heat footprint. With the smaller die-size, the card’s power consumption is set at 80 watts, just 5 watts beyond the PCIE slot can support. The extra 5-watts is taken from the PCIE power connector. I’m sure sooner or later; even low-powered versions of these cards will eliminate the need to connect a PCIE power connector similar to what is happening with the 9600GT and 9800GT variants. I asked permission to disassemble the card earlier to take a photo of just how small the die is but there was no answer so I took it as a no. Before you start cursing the gods why the memory bus is limited to 128 bit which may slow down memory bandwidth, you have to understand that this card is paired with GDDR5 memory which compensates for the limited bandwidth. Sooner or later I’m sure a 256-bit variation of this card will surface and by then, it would no longer be with this group but somewhat higher, maybe even higher than where the 4850 is right now.
Asus EAH4770 Formula Features
Just how unique this 4770 is from Asus you might ask. The reference cooler design is already sufficient the 40nm watt GPU but the problem lies with the noise the fan makes if one decides to run it at full speed. Asus basically addressed that with the EAH4770 Formula.




For starters, you’ll notice the fancy formula-1 heatsink. The fan and heatsink is specifically designed to lower down temperature and noise. During my tests, I fully configured the fan to run 100% and yet, it is still dead-silent. It runs so quiet that I would have to check if the fan is actually spinning from time to time. Another thing worth mentioning is that, Asus equipped the card with what they call “Ultimate Armaments” where they basically installed a combination of the best components for durability and performance. The EAH4770 has solid capacitors, low-RDS mosfets, covered chokes and EMI shield for the connectors. Not only that, they’ve added multiple OCP (over-current protection) for the graphics card which protects your other components (the PSU mainly) in case the primary OCP fails but enough of that, let’s take a closer look at the card itself.

Packaging Accessories and a Closer Look of the EAH4770 Formula

Err, there’s not much really to look at the packaging since the card arrived in a plain-looking cardboard box with foam to protect itself from shipping. This of course isn’t the retail packaging where I’m sure it’ll contain fancy prints and information of what’s inside but I believe in the saying, do not judge the book by its, in this case packaging . As far as the accessories are concerned, there really isn’t much. You get the following: support cd, installation manual and a two-molex-connector to PCIE adapter. No adapters you say? No worries, all the connectors you need are embedded on the card itself, have a good look later on.


While some people would love the design, others would simply hate it but again, the design has a purpose and it’s not just in there for the bling-effect. As Jeremy from Fine Upgrades would call it, “tamiya graphics card” .


Here’s a close-up shot on the fan and the heatsink. The fan blades are clearly optimized for high-static pressure output where the air sucked in is dissipated to the heatsink with ridges to increase the air friction and consequently, better heat transfer from heatsink to air.


From this angle, you can clearly see the power delivery for the card. Solid capacitors, check; Covered ferrite chokes, check; OCP protection, check; Low-RDS mosfets, err, wait a minute. Asus, whatever happened to the low-RDS on mosfets as promised? Photo on the right shows the lone PCIE power connector which completes the 80-watt TDP, if I’m not mistaken; the chip beside it is a PWM controller.


The Qimonda chip you see here is the GDDR5 memory used by the card. Video RAMs really do not require heatsinks so seeing it here bare-naked isn’t something to be worried about unless you plan on overvolting these fragile little things which would require PCB modifications. The left side is the revision which I feel including here because I failed to see the *cough* full low-RDS on mosfets that was advertised.




You’re now looking at the gold fingers for quad-crossfire configuration but then again, that would be impractical given that there aren’t many cheap motherboards in there that offer this feature. Finally, we have the backside view of the card, it looks pretty busy. Black PCB would have been much appreciated but getting a red one is better than the boring green PCB. Last picture explains why the lack of adapters, Asus puts 3 types of display ports on the card; Display Port, VGA and DVI.

Testing, Benchmarks and Overclocking
I still haven’t figured out how to make Call of Duty 5 and Crysis work on my machine, so basically, we’re stuck with Far Cry 2. Then again, I added a new game as per a recommendation from a friend – Street Fighter IV. The game offers superb graphics even though it doesn’t consume too much resource. The following is the system configuration of my testing.

As you can see, I left the clockspeed of the processor at 2.2 GHz because the system wouldn’t POST when using the 3.2 GHz overclock I’ve always had with my system. For some reason, the system would just cycle on restarts the minute I installed the graphics card. I already tried loosening the memory settings thinking it was the cause but it still wouldn’t work. Increasing the PCIE Frequency beyond 100 MHz doesn’t make any difference still. Despite of this drawback, I’m sure the processor won’t be the bottleneck factor to this as these as entry-level cards. The software used on my testing is listed below:
 3DMark Vantage
 3DMark ‘06
 Furmark 1.7.0
 Far Cry 2 (DirectX 9 and DirectX 10)
 Street Fighter IV


FutureMark 3DMark Vantage and 3DMark ‘06






3DMark Vantage and 3DMark ’06 are synthetic benchmarking software that tests the gaming capability of your system. 3DMark Vantage has been accused of favoring Nvidia graphics card because of PhysX which is why I included the un-biased 3DMark ’06. Higher is better.

Furmark 1.7.0




Furmark is a stress-testing and a benchmark utility using OpenGL to generate the image. As you can see, there’s not much difference between the two cards where if anti-aliasing is completely disabled, the 4770 takes over the lead. These differences I suspect, is because of the more mature drivers for Windows 7 from Nvidia compared to the newcomer, 4770.

Street Fighter IV





Street Fighter IV is a classic game but instead of the 2D action that you get, this one’s 3D with cool special light effects. The game is basically made for Nvidia. Do not be misled by the graph beside it, it’s simply the same. It looks exaggerated but they pretty much have the same FPS at 75 frames per second. It’s interesting to see that the 4770 beats Nvidia where this game is optimized for. Video settings are maxed out for this particular game and you can clearly see both cards are capable of taming this game down.

Far Cry 2







Far Cry 2 is a game that was developed by the same guys who created Crysis; this is a first-person shooter that offers an open world where you’re free to explore ala Grand Theft Auto except that this game comes with realistic graphics and awesome storyline. I had mixed results with this test so I had to do it twice to make sure. As you can see from the graph, the 4770 beats the 9800GT to a pulp on DirectX 9 mode with both 8x anti aliasing and no anti-aliasing, however, when switching to DirecX10, the 9800GT leads the score but not by much – negligible, so to speak.

Overclocking










ATI Overdrive is an application that comes with the driver. Simple and easy to use, you’ll have both options of manually setting your own frequencies or you can let the system overclock the card for you – I chose the latter. The stock GPU frequency of the 4770 is 750 while the memory clock is set at a measly 800 MHz With auto-tune, the program over clocked the card to 820 MHz for the GPU while 840 MHz for the memory. Maximum temperature with this setting is 75c, I’m sure I can still make it higher but I’ll leave it up to you. Asus did a good job with the cooler design as even when running the fan at full-speed, it’s completely inaudible.

Conclusion and Final Thoughts

The 4770 is an awesome card, this and partnered with Asus’ Formula engineering and you have a killer combination. While the heatsink/fan combo of the EAH4770 Formula may not appeal to everyone, the performance and feature it offers makes up for it. For someone who already has the 8800/9800 GT, this card may not be your choice for upgrading but if you want to drop the temperature in your system without sacrificing performance, this may be it, run this on crossfire and it beats the 4890 at a lesser price and a lesser power consumption. For the people who are still in the entry-level GeForce 7xxx or the entry-level Radeon 3xxx series still, then this is the answer to your prayers, you simply cannot go wrong with the EAH4770 Formula.