ATI Radeon HD 4770 Review
Overclocking
Whenever a new fabrication process comes to the market, one thought that travels through every enthusiast’s mind is about the overclocking potential of the card. Common consensus is that the smaller the fabrication process gets, the overclocking potential increases due to decreased heat output.
For finding the maximum overclock, we run the card through all of our gaming tests. The highest clocks at which it can pass all the tests is taken as the highest overclock. This card overclocked nicely. From the stock frequencies of 750 MHz/800 MHz (3200 MHz) GPU/Memory, I was able to overclock up to 875 MHz/ 975 MHz (3900 MHz effective) GPU/Memory. That’s an overclock of 16.7%/21.9% on GPU/Memory. It’s a pretty impressive overclock, which should help this card gain some extra frames per second in games.
Temperature and Power Consumption
To measure maximum temperature and power consumption, we turn to Furmark. Furmark represents one of the most intensive tests a GPU can run. Thus temperatures and power consumption measured with Furmark represent the worst-case scenario. Although no game today puts as much load on the GPU as Furmark does, should a game do that in future, you will be ready armed with the knowledge gained by testing with Furmark – knowing how hot your card can get and how much power it can consume.
According to its developer, “FurMark is a very intensive OpenGL benchmark that uses fur rendering algorithms to measure the performance of the graphics card. Fur rendering is especially adapted to overheat the GPU and that’s why FurMark is also a perfect stability and stress test tool (also called GPU burner) for the graphics card. This benchmark requires an OpenGL 2.0 compliant graphics card: NVIDIA GeForce 5/6/7/8 (and higher), AMD/ATI Radeon 9600 (and higher) or a S3 Graphics Chrome 400 series with the latest graphics drivers.”
To save power, this card downclocks to 250 MHz on the GPU Core. The ambient temperature was maintained at 21-22 C.
Here are the settings used for temperature measurement and the result on the right:
| Temperature (C) | |
|
Idle |
47 |
|
Load |
66 |
| http://alienbabeltech.com/main/wp-content/uploads/2009/06/vantage-test-settings.jpg | Power Consumption – System (Watts) |
|
Idle |
142 |
|
Load |
204 |
