ATI Radeon HD 4770 Review
Under the Hood
Let’s take the cooler off and see what’s hidden under there. To take off the cooler you need to take off 8 screws: 6 on the back of the PCB as shown in the image below, the other 2 from the I/O faceplate which hold the memory chip heatsink in place.
Taking the cooler off, we see that the memory chips are covered by a black heatsink. This card use 3-phase power circuitry with three power transistors in each phase.
In the pictures below, you see the heat fins that the air gets pushed through to the outside through the back of the case. The cooler uses 2 heatpipes. This should be enough, as this is a 40nm GPU and shouldn’t produce much heat. The original HD 4870 AMD reference cooler also used 2 heatpipes, but AMD decided to tweak that design to 3 heatpipes with the launch of HD 4890. As a result HD 4890 runs cooler than HD 4870.
After taking off the memory chips heatsink, we see that this card uses 8 GDDR5 memory chips of 64 MB each. The memory chips here are made by Qimonda, model number, IDGV51-05A1F1C-40X. They are rated to run up to 1000 (4000) MHz frequency with 1.5V voltage. As they are only clocked at 800 (3200) MHz on a stock HD 4770, we know that they probably have good overclocking headroom.
Here is the RV 740 GPU again, in case you missed it on the previous page. The GPU marking (0911) tells you the production date: week 11 of 2009 – which is March 8-14, 2009.
