Introduction

AMD's Radeon HD 4770 with its RV740 GPU is the first graphics card using a 40 nanometer graphics processor. Initially released in April 2009, the availability of the cards was quite limited due to supply issues in the GPU production. Now stocks seems to be normalizing again and with better GPU availability partners will start to build their own designs.

One of the first such custom HD 4770 designs is Powercolor's HD 4770 PCS. It uses an Arctic Cooling Accelero L2 for reduced noise and higher cooling performance. Unfortunately that is the only change that will affect you as user. Performance specifications like clock speeds, memory size etc. have remained the same. This seems to be due to an AMD policy that does not allow HD 4770 cards to be built that perform better than HD 4770 reference designs. The most probable reason for that is that AMD does not want HD 4850/4870 sales to hurt.

It should also be noted that the PCB has been largely redesigned, especially power circuitry has seen some changes which should result in a reduced production cost.