PowerColor HD 4770 PCS Review - PAGE 1

The summer is slowly winding down. Days will soon become shorter; nights much colder. People will start having to wear more clothes. But there is no need to let this get you down. After all, the arrival of Fall is an excellent excuse for a quick trip to the local hardware store, for a upgrade or two for your home gaming rig.

If your budget for a potential video card upgrade is close to around the $100 USD mark, then you are now probably aware of ATI's HD 4770. Featuring the world's first production  40nm GPU, and the quickest video memory currently out there, GDDR5, the HD 4770 has an attractive feature set, and offers a respectable level of gaming performance.

PowerColor are responsible for today's particular HD 4770. While the core and memory clocks for the PowerColor HD 4770 PCS have not been changed, PowerColor did change a few things from the default design -- most notably, making use of the expertise of the folks at Artic Cooling, to come up with a custom cooler.

Last week we reviewed a VisionTek HD 4770, featuring the same specifications as today's PowerColor HD 4770 PCS. This dispels a bit of the suspense of this week's benchmarks. So, in an effort to keep things interesting, we decided to take a look at CrossFire HD 4770 performance in addition to our regular benchmarks. 

The CrossFire potential of the HD 4770 was immediately apparent with the release of this video card. Generally with most video cards, in most cases, CrossFire (or SLI) is a better bet to take advantage of either as a possible upgrade path, a long time after initially buying your video card -- it just most often works out that you'd get more bang for your buck if you bought a faster single video card, as opposed to pair of less expensive cards. But there are exceptions -- and the particular specifications of the HD 4770, and the $100 price-tag, make today's HD 4770 a candidate to possibly be one of these exceptions.