AMD ATI Radeon HD 4770 512MB GDDR5 review

Page 12 - Overclock, temperatures and cooler noise

HD 4770 has all the prerequisites to win the hearts of overclocking enthusiasts. As we already said the card is the first with a 40nm core, consumes very little, yet has a additional power connector and as we're about to see - generates little heat and has new GDDR5 memory...

For overclocking we used the famous tool Riva Tuner (ver. 2.20), with slight hack in its configuration in order to allow it to work alright with the HD 4770 drivers, which at the time of the testing were incompatible with it. A little later a correctly working with Catalyst 9.4. drivers version of Riva Tuner was released

The stable card maximum was... 875MHz for the core (16%) and 1100MHz for the memory (37.5%), which is nothing short of amazing! Pity though we only had a referent AMD card, but after the official release of the card as we saw in other websites ad forums almost all HD 4770 models are easily capable of reaching these results. The overall card performance after overclock was increased by approximately 17% in 3DMark Vantage (P8134 instead of P6932 at stock frequencies). And about 15% is the raise in the frames per second in the games we tested.

The core temperature of the card without overclock was 42 degrees centigrade in idle mode and 64 under load. After the serious overclock mentioned above it hit 44 degrees in idle and 68 under loadр, which is very pleasantly low, even though at full load the cooler is not exactly silent. Yep, not silent at all. As whole we could live with a slightly higher temperatures if that would help to keep the noise down. Yes, that could be fixed with some tinkering in the card bios, but that is a operation for well seasoned users only, ones well aware of what they're doing. Because if they make even a small mistake that might kill the card.