Mid-range graphics cards deliver more bang for their buck now than ever before—their many-core GPUs let them play right along with the big boys. In our most recent benchmarks, you’ll see that the Radeon HD 4670, Radeon HD 4770, and GeForce 9800 GT handle the highest graphics quality settings in today's most popular games without any real difficulty. The bit trade-off happens when you try enabling anti-aliasing, which can quickly overwhelm an inexpensive board. It’s important not to set levels too high so as to keep performance acceptable.
It’s impressive to see a Radeon HD 4670, which you can pick up for as low as $65 these days, keep up with a high-end card from yesteryear, like the Radeon HD 2900 XT (ATI’s flagship card in 2007). Likewise, this card matches the Radeon HD 3850 and the Radeon HD 3870, but consumes less power. In the pages to come, you'll also see a comparison between the Radeon HD 4770 and the HD 4830, which explores whether or not a 128-bit memory bus can compete against a 256-bit pathway (loaded with GDDR3), or if good driver support and GDDR5 DRAM can help offset such a mismatch at a comparable price point.
A total of five cards have made their way into this comparison, including actively-cooled single-slot models and a passively-cooled card with a Zalman VNF 100 iSilence4 heatsink. As a bonus, we also throw in a doubled-up CrossFire configuration for the HIS Radeon HD 4670 with the super-quiet IceQ cooler, which provides a genuine alternative to the Radeon HD 4850, the GeForce 8800 Ultra, the GeForce 9800 GTX+, and the GeForce GTS 250.
- CrossFire With IceQ Is Very Quiet
- Graphics Chips Compared And Test Configuration
- HIS H467PS1GP iSilence (Passively-Cooled Radeon HD 4670, 1,024 MB)
- HIS H467QT512P (Radeon HD 4670, 512 MB)
- HIS H467QT512P CrossFire (Radeon HD 4670, 2 x 512 MB, CF)
- Sapphire HD 4770 512M (Radeon HD 4770, 512 MB)
- Sapphire HD 4830 512 MB (Radeon HD 4830, 512 MB)
- Zotac GeForce 9800 GT 512 MB (GeForce 9800 GT, 512 MB)
- Benchmark Results: Fallout 3
- Benchmark Results: Far Cry 2
- Benchmark Results: F.E.A.R. 2
- Benchmark Results: Left 4 Dead
- Benchmark Results: The Last Remnant
- Benchmark Results: Tom Clancy’s EndWar
- Benchmark Results: Tom Clancy’s H.A.W.X
- Benchmark Results: 3DMark06
- Power Consumption, Noise Levels, And Temperature Readings
- Conclusion: Sapphire's Radeon HD 4770 Gets A Recommendation

and not to mention they both look intimidating in my case
4770 in crossfire or single 4890 best bet???..
They already did a whole article on that...
Searching for prices in US and Europe it retails cheaper than the GTX260(192 or 216).
The point is: the card should be included in the test just as the GTX260-216. It's clearly a better option than the 512 mb version and it's good for comparison!
Sorry I thought the article was 'mainstream graphics cards' not 4890 vs 2x4770's in crossfire ! Blimey I must be going mad.
They already did a whole article on that...
Sorry I thought the article was 'mainstream graphics cards' not 4890 vs 2x4770's in crossfire ! Blimey I must be going mad.
The only reason that I could think of wherein the 4770 is better, is the smaller manufacturing process which should make it cooler and consume less power. Though if raw performance is your concern, the 4850 may be better.
They usually do it on the highest rig they have to eliminate as much possible bottlenecks as possible. I think they were just making sure that video card's respective scores do not flat-out (i.e. the GTX 275, 260, 4870 and 4890 displaying the same scores when they are clearly a bit different hardware). Ideally even on lower-end hardware this chart should still show the same order in terms of performace, though you'd probably lose a few fps.
well then it begs the question, which card is more platform limited. I mean the driver may scale differently with CPU power, so the card winning on the overclocked i7 may actualy be the worst on a stock PII X3 720 BE, or X2 550 BE.
thus testing mainstream GPUs on high-end platforms has a flaw here ...
As for this statement I have one OBVIOUS mention. Why did they use The Last Remnant for testing again?