Pemalite said:
Bofferbrauer2 said:
When mentioning both, you should really have mentioned the legendary Radeon HD 4770. - Performance almost on par with the 4850, sometimes even beating it? Check!
- Affordable? Doublecheck! (MSRP was just $109(!), the 4850 cost almost twice as much with $199)
- Cool and quiet? Also check. TDP was just 80W for the card.
It was really the best GPU one could get back in the days without breaking the bank, and NVidia had nothing to counter it. Oh, they tried with the GTX 275 (the first 70 card btw)... but it wasn't really faster, much more expensive ($250) and much hotter with a TDP of 219W |
The irony is the Radeon HD 4730 was a better GPU than the 4770.
Same number of functional units, but the 4730 had the bandwidth of a 4830... And some variants had higher clockspeeds than the 4770.
And the other benefit? It was cheaper and overclocked like a champ being a die-harvested 4870.
But you are correct the 4770 was a legendary card.
The 4850 at $199 was still stupidly affordable compared to what we have today... $199 USD in 2008 accounting for inflation would be the equivalent of $293 USD today.
...I should also mention how legendary the Radeon 6950 was.
I had four of them in Crossfire... And using a simple BIOS mod, I was able to unlock the extra shader cores and turn them into full-fledged Radeon 6970's.
..And this was at a time when you could use a BIOS glitch (ACC aka. Advanced Clock Calibration) to unlock CPU cores and cache on Phenom/Athlon processors. |
The 4730 had just two problems: 1. Half the amount of ROPs compared to the 4770 and 4850. This limited the card sometimes, otherwise it was very good, and 2. It was very rare (at least here), so finding one was the main issue.
Yeah, I can remember the ACC. Tried it on my Athlon II X4 635 but sadly it didn't work, probably my cache was compromised so it couldn't be reactivated properly.
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