Date:
Tuesday , August 18, 2009
Author:
Brent Justice
Editor:
Kyle Bennett
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AMD Radeon HD 4770 CrossFire Evaluation

For near the same price as a single Radeon HD 4890 1GB video card you can install two Radeon HD 4770 video cards in a dual-GPU CrossFire configuration. The question is, "What kind of value and performance do both configurations provide and which one is going to give you the best gaming experience?"

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System Test Setup

We will be using a Gigabyte EX58-UD5 motherboard, an Intel Core i7 920 Overclocked at 3.6GHz, and 6GB of Corsair TR3X6G1600C8D Dominator DDR3.

While it might be a bit "overkill," we use the i7 9120 at 3.6GHz processor in an attempt to keep from putting our evaluation into a position of being CPU limited. Obviously, we make every effort to not use CPU limited games for video card evaluations, but the i7 920 at 3.6GHz seems to put many peoples’ minds at ease when it comes to that subject.

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We are using Windows 7 RC Build 7100 for this evaluation. We’ve got the absolute latest Catalyst 9.8 WHQL installed for all three AMD video card configurations.

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You can see we have the Catalyst 9.8 package installed, the most recent driver from AMD as of today, Monday August 17, 2009.

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CrossFire was enabled by default once we installed our drivers; we never had to interact with this driver menu option.

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GPUz confirms the clock speeds, both video cards, while they are of a different manufacturer, both have the exact same clock speeds.

Evaluation Method

We evaluate what each video card configuration can supply us in terms of a playable gaming experience while supplying the best culmination of resolution and "eye candy" graphical settings. We focus on quality and immersion of the gameplay experience rather than how many frames per second the card can get in a canned benchmark or prerecorded timedemo situation that often do not represent real gameplay like you would experience at home. Then we will follow with apples-to-apples testing in with minimum, maximum, and average framerates.