Everyone wants to know how far their money can go these days and that you want to make sure that you get the most that you can for it. Sapphire and ATI knows this and they have come up with their own "stimulus" plan by bringing out the new HD 4770 PCI-e video card. Targeted toward the mid-level of video cards does this new and surprising card make it worth your hard earned money?
First Impression:
A new card deserves a new box right? Well Sapphire has done so and with the box is full of information about the card and all that it is capable of doing. Proudly displayed on the front of the box we see that the Sapphire HD 4770 uses the much better and faster GDDR5 Memory rather than the other GDDR memory that others use.
The same information from the front of the box also makes it way to the back, but with even more data and highlights.
The specifications about for the card are also listed on the box to make sure that you are made aware of any special needs or requirements. It is always a good idea to at least skim over this on any purchase that you make as double checking now may save a headache later.
Once we open up the box we are presented to the Sapphire 4470 (in a protective bag), the manual, and the normal disks we see in most of the Sapphire boxes of PowerDVD, DVD suite and the drivers CD. Missing this time was the Ruby Disk we have seen in past product releases.
As always Sapphire does make sure that you have plenty of options to connect your brand new card to different video outputs. Included in the box and hidden below the card itself is a CrossFire bridge ribbon, a RBG connector via s-video, a DVI-I to VGA adapter, DVI-I to HDMI adapter and finally a molex to six pins connector just in case you do not have one available or only have one. This will help out if you plan on taking the card to the next level by doing a CrossFire setup.
Redefine HD Gaming Advanced Memory GDDR5 provides twice the data per pin of GDDR3 memory at the same clock speeds.
Enhanced Anti-Aliasing (AA) & Anisotropic Filtering (AF) High performance anisotropic filtering and 24x custom filter anti-aliasing (CFAA) smooth jagged edges and create true-to-life graphics, for everything from grass to facial features.
Microsoft DirectX 10.1 Play today while preparing for tomorrow with state-of-the-art DirectX 10.1 graphics capabilities.
ATI CrossFireX™ Technology ATI CrossFireX™ technology with up to quad GPU support offers superior scalability so your system is ready to level up when you are.
PCI Express 2.0 Support for PCI Express 2.0 will prepare you for bandwidth-hungry games and 3D applications.
Power to Spare This GPU has the brute processing power needed for physics, artificial intelligence, stream computing and ray tracing calculations. Go Beyond HD Video Unified Video Decoder 2(UVD 2) Unified Video Decoder 2 frees up your CPU for other tasks so you get The Ultimate Visual Experience™ for even the most processing-intensive content, including VC-1, H.264 and now MPEG-2. Also, take full advantage of Blu-ray functionality with dual-stream, picture in picture (PIP) capabilities.
Accelerated Video Trans coding (AVT) With ATI Stream technology, owners of ATI Radeon™ HD 4770 GPUs can help accelerate the conversion of standard and HD video into multiple formats for use on differing consumer electronics devices. The ATI Video Converter, designed to enable GPU trans coding of HD video streams, is currently available.
Enhanced DVD Upscaling Watch standard DVD movies in near high-definition quality with DVD upscaling. The GPU uses post processing algorithms to enhance standard and low resolution videos and movies on your HD display.
Dynamic Contrast Dynamic Contrast automatically adjusts the contrast and brightness during scenes to consistently deliver a crisp, vibrant picture.
HDMI Enjoy the latest audio technologies using HDMI with 7.1 digital surround sound support. Also, xvYCC support allows the user to enjoy a wider range of color when connected to a capable HDTV.
1 HD capable monitor required 2 Blu-ray drive required 3 The ATI Radeon™ HD 4770 GPU can upscale video display to 2560x1600 on dual-link monitors which is almost twice the display resolution of 1080p displays.
Break-through Efficiency Dynamic Power Management ATI Radeon HD 4770 GPU delivers high performance when needed and conserves power when the demand on the graphics processor is low. System Requirements – PCI Express® based PC is required with one X16 lane graphics slot available on the motherboard – 450 Watt or greater power supply with one 75W 6-pin PCI Express® power connectors recommended (550 Watt and two 6-pin connectors for ATI CrossFireX™ technology in dual mode)” – Certified power supplies are recommended. Refer to http://ati.amd.com/certifiedPSU for a list of Certified products – Minimum 1GB of system memory –Installation software requires CD-ROM drive –DVD playback requires DVD drive –Blu-ray™ / HD DVD playback requires Blu-ray / HD DVD drive –For a complete ATI CrossFireX™ system, a second ATI Radeon™ HD 4770 graphics card, an ATI CrossFireX Ready motherboard and one ATI CrossFireX Bridge Interconnect cable per board are required
