According to our test, HD 4770 CrossFire brings more than 80% 3D performance improvements, superior to HD 4890 nearly 20%. When loaded by 3D tasks, the CrossFire platform sees about 80-100W power consumption increase compared with single HD 4890, but it still consumes less power than HD 4890 does.
On the other hand, PowerPlay function disables the automatic decrease of GDDR5 memory clock, so HD 4770 CrossFire brings a bit higher power consumption than HD 4890 when idle or playing videos. We believe that the upcoming non-reference cards will see an improvement in this.
According to Newegg, the MSRP of HD 4770 has improved from the claimed $99 to $109.99, while HD 4890 is currently sold at $249.99, which means HD 4770 CrossFire still costs less than HD 4890. Besides, thanks to the advanced 40nm technology, HD 4770 comes with less power consumption and more room of core/memory clock improved, so HD 4770 X2 will hopefully become a deadly weapon to confront with NVIDIA’s GeForce GTX 285.
Of course it’s not easy to make a HD 4770 X2, as our experience tells that X2 graphics cards are usually less effective than CrossFire platform with two cards. Besides, the HD 4770 X2 might have a bottleneck when playing anti-aliasing games with inadequate memory size. 1G memory is quite essential for the multi-card platform. As you know, CrossFire doesnt double the memory. The last but not least, it’s still uncertain whether the yield rate of 40nm RV740 is enough or not.
SK
