ATI HD 4770: 40 nm, RV740 -- SPCR reviewed

They make noise, too.

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silo
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Post by silo » Sat Apr 25, 2009 8:24 am

ntavlas wrote:This is not nessesarily the case, the pre release card looks a little overengineered to me.
While power consumption at load might increase, when idle it could be the other way round. At those power levels the fewer components could be more efficient.
The power usage at load seems in line with expectations anyway. I hope the high idle power draw is because of overestimated voltages even though my instict tells me otherwise.

or maybe this card was to good ocr, so they neutered a shiton in order to sell their good ol 4850, oh and that few components comment is pure gold.

Anodyne
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First review of Radeon 4770

Post by Anodyne » Sat Apr 25, 2009 12:54 pm

I've never heard of this website before, but they have posted a 'first' review of a Radeon HD 4770.

http://en.expreview.com/2009/04/24/firs ... nster.html

Ant6n
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Post by Ant6n » Sat Apr 25, 2009 1:37 pm

so again this raises the question whether one should get the geforce 250gts or the hd4770. The performance seems almost equal, they both seem to consume about 80 Watts on load, and both cost around 100$ (the 250 is currently at 110 AR, and will probably drop a bit more during the next couple of weeks).
There seems to be very little difference, except maybe the ATI card sounding 'good' because it's 40 nm, and the nvidia card sounding 'bad' because it is a rebrand.

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Post by K.Murx » Sat Apr 25, 2009 3:48 pm

Ant6n wrote:so again this raises the question whether one should get the geforce 250gts or the hd4770. The performance seems almost equal, they both seem to consume about 80 Watts on load, and both cost around 100$ (the 250 is currently at 110 AR, and will probably drop a bit more during the next couple of weeks).
There seems to be very little difference, except maybe the ATI card sounding 'good' because it's 40 nm, and the nvidia card sounding 'bad' because it is a rebrand.
ATI/AMD could need some money, and has historrically been a more open and friendly company than Nvidia. As a consumer, it is a very good idea to keep as many players as possible in the market.

So, if there is no other "decisive factor", I suggest to go with the smaller player (ATI).

silo
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Post by silo » Sat Apr 25, 2009 4:58 pm

Ant6n wrote:so again this raises the question whether one should get the geforce 250gts or the hd4770. The performance seems almost equal, they both seem to consume about 80 Watts on load, and both cost around 100$ (the 250 is currently at 110 AR, and will probably drop a bit more during the next couple of weeks).
There seems to be very little difference, except maybe the ATI card sounding 'good' because it's 40 nm, and the nvidia card sounding 'bad' because it is a rebrand.
na, 55nm, 40nm? it really makes no difference, lower production cost? Who gives a shit ATI? Give me lower idle power consumption or GTFO, go with the 250gts, that's what im going to do. at the end of the day they are BOTH OLD TECH, guess whats going to happen when dx11 / shader model 5 arrives? > hey sorry pal, buy a new videocard, ok sir.
( i know i wont be buying a shit " next next gen console")

btw ati drivers suck big time. ( ms framework? + 47 services? FU CCC)

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Post by ryboto » Sat Apr 25, 2009 7:21 pm

silo wrote: btw ati drivers suck big time. ( ms framework? + 47 services? FU CCC)
Sorry to hear that, I've never had a problem with them outside of BF2, and I don't even remove them when upgrading, I just let the new driver package do it's thing. I would like to know why it's so hard for them to match the idle power of the 3870/3850..

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Post by pedrofdmp » Sun Apr 26, 2009 8:43 am

Idle power is worst compared to the 4850, the memory is not underclocking.

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Post by thejamppa » Sun Apr 26, 2009 10:09 am

pedrofdmp wrote:Idle power is worst compared to the 4850, the memory is not underclocking.
which is due GDDR5. If you start underclocking GDDR5, system becomes instable. However underclocking memory saves you only few meager watts. You get much more effective power saving by dropping the voltages...

pedrofdmp
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Post by pedrofdmp » Sun Apr 26, 2009 10:18 am

thejamppa wrote:
pedrofdmp wrote:Idle power is worst compared to the 4850, the memory is not underclocking.
which is due GDDR5. If you start underclocking GDDR5, system becomes instable. However underclocking memory saves you only few meager watts. You get much more effective power saving by dropping the voltages...
Hope this gets better with the retail cards, i've been waiting to buy a 4770 since i sold my 3650 (have a x700 i borrowed form a friend right now). Now i'm thinking of getting a powercolor pcs 4670 for 50€ second hand and wait till the next generation for better cards :(

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Post by Ant6n » Mon Apr 27, 2009 6:19 pm

so xbitlabs reviewed the product, and it's much more favorable here. The performance comparison to the gts250 is marginal, and the idle power seems much lower than the hd4850. Max power is apparently only 50 Watts, although they tested it on an old cpu, with some probably no t very demanding benchmark. Article:
http://xbitlabs.com/articles/video/disp ... 770_2.html

Image

Image

The crazy thing is that with a max ~110 Watt power requirement, one could almost run these things in crossfire :P

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Post by Matija » Mon Apr 27, 2009 9:47 pm

They got a reference card. That probably changes things a bit :(

Interesting card. Might be an awesome upgrade over the 4670, depending on how well it can be cooled passively. S1/S2 probably won't fit, the HR-03 might, but it's unlikely that you can use RAM heatsinks on it (are they even needed on GDDR-5?)...

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Post by MikeC » Mon Apr 27, 2009 10:42 pm


silo
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Post by silo » Mon Apr 27, 2009 10:43 pm


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Post by Vicotnik » Mon Apr 27, 2009 11:09 pm

17.4W idle is still far too much. I'm very disappointed with ATi, why will they not take idle power consumption seriously? I mean in this day of all sorts of "green" products.. After the 4670 I thought we were on the right track.

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Post by lb_felipe » Tue Apr 28, 2009 1:00 am

On the Newegg have only HD 4770 with differenciated cooler in relation to the reference stock cooler. :(

Link.

Will be that this cooler (alternative) is as or more quiet as the reference stock cooler?

(My english is a shit :oops:)

Matija
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Post by Matija » Tue Apr 28, 2009 1:03 am

You will never, ever be able to buy cards that have the cooler like on the cards given to reviewers (SPCR included).

The PCB also differs. Retail cards have missing elements.

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Post by lb_felipe » Tue Apr 28, 2009 1:38 am

I agree, but the reviewers cards typically use a cooler similar to those used in retail cards. This time, the first retail cards of the brands is very different.

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Post by silo » Tue Apr 28, 2009 1:49 am

WOW NICE CARD AND COOLER > goes to newegg and stares in disbelieve .... so 4770 flopped. NEXT!

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Post by sampo » Tue Apr 28, 2009 2:02 am

silo wrote:WOW NICE CARD AND COOLER > goes to newegg and stares in disbelieve .... so 4770 flopped. NEXT!
Could you tone it down a bit? We all get your message... Non reference models are coming in a couple of weeks. The low max consumption would make this card ideal for passive cooling.

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Post by Kriz » Tue Apr 28, 2009 2:46 am

I suspect that what the reviewers are getting are not exactly the same, either a slightly different design or BIOS, or there is an inconsistency with Powerplay in the supplied drivers. It is an absolute requirement that a copy of the BIOS be kept and compared to any further sample that SPCR receives, and not just an RBE comparison but at the byte level.

I'm sure that everybody that bought a HD4670 based on the power figures that SPCR reported are still feeling a little less trust for SPCR and ATI because of the 3W idle that no card on the market has ever been able to achieve.

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Post by sampo » Tue Apr 28, 2009 3:33 am

pcgameshardwarecom wrote:Only in idle mode the power consumption seems to be a little high. Other Radeon cards show how to do it right. Apparently the reason for this result is still the high frequency of the GDDR5 video memory - since the clock speed is not reduced if the card is running in idle mode but stays at 800 MHz. So the chip internal buffers have to run with four times the frequency. If the clock speed is manually set to 450 MHz the power consumption is reduced to slightly above 20 watt.
So with few tweaks the idle consumption should be acceptable, assuming that underclocking GDDR5 won't make the card unstable.

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Post by Mats » Tue Apr 28, 2009 3:48 am

Great review!
There was only one thing missing, but I didn't really expect it would be included in there...

A quote from Xtremesystems forums:
SKYMTL wrote:
Lightman wrote:From my personal tests with HD4870 I've concluded that Clock Gating is working as advertised.The problem lies in lack of ability to downclock GDDR5 memory on the fly.

I've did simple test back when the cards arrived. Using my Kill-A-Watt I've first measured idle power consumption of my system with card clocked in CCC 500/900 then I manually reduced core clock to 160MHz leaving memory at 900MHz. This saved me 1W off total system power consumption. On the other hand downclocking memory from 900MHz to 465MHz saved me 40W!

I think the problem with GDDR5 lies in it's specifics like clock retraining for different freq. and only newer memory controller will hopefully fix that. For now every time I'm changing memory clock on my cards screen flickers for a fraction of a second (probably retraining memory clocks during that time).
Yes and no. The issue is that the Clock Gating was supposed to work for both the memory AND the GPU core. To be honest with you though, I have tried the same test with a clamp meter and a HD 4870 1GB plugged into a PCI-E daughter board and reducing the core clock with the 9.3 drivers (at the time) to 200Mhz reduced the power consumption by a good 25W at idle if I remember correctly.

I think these variances in readings are largely based on the movement from one driver to the next. It almost seems like ATI is still fiddling with the settings every now and then.
I'm really curious if something can be done with the high GDDR5 clock speed and idle power usage. Any chance we'll see an update in the review? Maybe it's not even possible to make the card lower the memory speed automatically.

Techpowerup have a comment about the different coolers:
The cooler uses two slots and does look quite different to the one we have seen on the various leaks. Where the heatsink on the leaks looked very weak, this cooler looks like a very capable solution that can properly cool the whole card. We asked AMD to clarify why there was a discrepancy between our cooler and the one we saw on the leaked images and it seems that AIBs were given a choice which cooler to use. All AIBs went for the cheaper one, so initially there will be no HD 4770s on store shelves that use the same cooler as our review sample.
Here are more review links.

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Post by ryboto » Tue Apr 28, 2009 4:23 am

skimmed through a few reviews, bit-tech also seems to have a lower idle power card, at least with respect to their 4830 sample,
http://www.bit-tech.net/hardware/graphi ... 0-512mb/13
idle
4770 system 170W
4830 system 180W


....Most reviews seem in-line with SPCR though, one had the 4770 idle drawing more than a 4850. Damn, I really wanted to upgrade too...

Mats
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Post by Mats » Tue Apr 28, 2009 4:32 am

The budget cooler isn't new, look here.

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Post by Mats » Tue Apr 28, 2009 6:38 am

Madshrimps brings one of the most interesting posts, as usual.

I wonder when the 4750 will show up.

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Post by CA_Steve » Tue Apr 28, 2009 7:07 am

Thanks for the review, Lawrence!

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Post by QuietOC » Tue Apr 28, 2009 7:33 am

Still not as good price/performance as my $50 96-shader 9600GSO, but it should be a great deal when it gets cheaper.
Mats wrote:It's still 58% faster than the 9600GSO, and the prices on launch day doesn't really say much, they never have done and never will.
Sorry, no, it isn't. My GSO is faster than a 9600 GT. Those are probably the wimpy 48-shader GSOs in those reviews. So <25% extra performance for twice as much money = not impressive.
Last edited by QuietOC on Tue Apr 28, 2009 9:05 am, edited 2 times in total.

Mats
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Post by Mats » Tue Apr 28, 2009 7:47 am

It's still 58% faster than the 9600GSO, and the prices on launch day doesn't really say much, they never have done and never will. $89 is the lowest I've seen, (with MIR :P).

(Yeah I know how bad a MIR can be.)

sampo
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Post by sampo » Tue Apr 28, 2009 8:28 am

PCStats review shows that ASUS 4770 has 7W lower idle consumption than MSI 4830 OC:

www pcstats com articleview.cfm?articleid=2392&page=2

Wasn't the MSI card one of the most efficient 4830 models?

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Post by angelkiller » Tue Apr 28, 2009 9:03 am

QuietOC wrote:Still not as good price/performance as my $50 96-shader 9600GSO, but it should be a great deal when it gets cheaper.
Or maybe it already is?
SPCR 4770 Article wrote:a reduction in fan speed would probably have little impact on maximum load temperature.
Does current software allow the fan to be turned down? If so, was the card tested with slower rpms? How much quieter is it when the fan is slowed down and how does this affect the temperatures?

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