ATI Radeon HD 4770 40nm GPU, $99 Graphics Return

Name: ATI Radeon HD 4770 40nm GPU, $99 Graphics Return - Page 8
Brand: ATI

by Marco Chiappetta — Tuesday, April 28, 2009, 12:00 AM EDT

We'd like to cover a few final data points before bringing this article to a close. Throughout all of our benchmarking and testing, we monitored how much power our test systems were consuming using a power meter. Our goal was to give you an idea as to how much power each configuration used while idling and under a heavy workload. Please keep in mind that we were testing total system power consumption at the outlet here, not just the power being drawn by the motherboards alone.

Total System Power Consumption

Tested at the Outlet

Using a 40nm process to manufacture the Radeon HD 4770 seems to have really paid off in regard to its power consumption characteristics, at least when the card is running at its reference specifications. In our power consumptions tests, the new Radeon HD 4770 consumed the least amount of power at both idle and under load. What's most impressive is the comparison between the 4850 and 4770--although both cards offer somewhat similar performance depending on the game / settings being used, the Radeon HD 4770 consumes significantly less power under load.

With power consumption this low, it should come as no surprise that the Radeon HD 4770 is a fairly quiet card to operate. Under idle conditions, the Radeon HD 4770 is inaudible over the noise produced by the average CPU cooler and PSU. And under load, the card's fan barely spins up at all. We did have one strange occurrence during our 3DMark Vantage testing where the Radeon HD 4770's fan spun up to full speed and was quite loud, but it happened only once, lasted for only a moment and never happened again.

Tags: AMD, ATI, Radeon, Gaming, graphics, GPU

Marco Chiappetta

Marco's interest in computing and technology dates all the way back to his early childhood. Even before being exposed to the Commodore P.E.T. and later the Commodore 64 in the early ‘80s, he was interested in electricity and electronics, and he still has the modded AFX cars and shop-worn soldering irons to prove it. Once he got his hands on his own Commodore 64, however, computing became Marco's passion. Throughout his academic and professional lives, Marco has worked with virtually every major platform from the TRS-80 and Amiga, to today's high end, multi-core servers. Over the years, he has worked in many fields related to technology and computing, including system design, assembly and sales, professional quality assurance testing, and technical writing. In addition to being the Managing Editor here at HotHardware for close to 15 years, Marco is also a freelance writer whose work has been published in a number of PC and technology related print publications and he is a regular fixture on HotHardware’s own Two and a Half Geeks webcast. - Contact: marco(at)hothardware(dot)com