ATI Radeon HD 4770 CrossFire Video Card Review

Radeon HD 4770 in CrossFire

Last week I brought you a review on ATIs new Radeon HD 4770 graphics card and followed that up with a guide on how to overclock the card with RivaTuner. When the ATI Radeon HD 4770 512MB was announced it cost $109 with a $10 rebate, but today the card can be found for $99 without a rebate to mess with. If you search around a little you can find the HIS Radeon HD 4770 for $104.99 minus the $10 rebate. That means you can pick up a Radeon HD 4770 for as little as $94.99! If you bought a pair of these cards and ran them in CrossFire you’d be out ~$190, which isn’t a bad price considering what you get and how well they overclock. The question is will a pair of Radeon HD 4770 graphics cards running in CrossFire be able to perform faster than the $172.58 Radeon HD 4870 1GB or the $189.99 XFX GeForce GTX 260 Core 216 as the are great cards in the $170-$190 price range. If a pair of Radeon HD 4770 graphics cards in CrossFire can’t perform better than either of these single card solutions it wouldn’t be worth the money to run CrossFire.

Armed with a pair of ATI Radeon HD 4770 reference cards I was ready to see what a pair of these cards can do in the benchmarks. In the original review the Radeon HD 4770 seemed to be limited by the number of stream processors and the 512MB frame buffer. With a pair of Radeon HD 4770 graphics cards the number of available processing power doubles since the card is paired with another.

You now have 1,280 total shader processors, two 512 MB GDDR5 frame buffers (each on a 128-bit bus), 32 total ROPs and the ability to filter up to 64 textured pixels per clock. When running in CrossFire configuration the clock frequencies remain the same, so each card will still run at 750MHz core clock and 800MHz. That also means the memory bandwidth and data rate will remain the same. Will twice the number of stream processors and doubling the frame buffer help in games? Let’s take a look at the test system and find out.