Sapphire Radeon HD 4770 512MB and CrossFire performance review

After taking a look at HIS' Radeon HD 4770 part at launch, today we examine Sapphire's own Radeon HD 4770 board. As it utilises the same clock speeds and cooling solution as the aforementioned card, we've decided to spice things up by also examining CrossFire performance using a pair of Radeon HD 4770 cards, which adds up to a tantalising little sub-£200 solution which threatens to give the Radeon HD 4890 a run for its money. Is it worthy of consideration?

"At idle, our system when coupled with the Sapphire Radeon HD 4770 uses around 135 Watts of power, which increases to 170 Watts in a CrossFire configuration, almost identical to the power consumption of a single Radeon HD 4890. During video playback the Radeon HD 4890 actually uses slightly less power than our CrossFire setup, with a single Radeon HD 4770 board consuming a tad under 150 Watts.

Finally, rendering an intensive 3D rendering workload, a single Radeon HD 4770 in league with our Core i7 system uses 185 Watts, which rises to 258 Watts in a CrossFire configuration, less than the Radeon HD 4890's 275 Watt consumption under load."