ASUS EAH 4770 Formula Video Card

As we've already mentioned, we received a pre-retail sample. What we got was the video card, a small manual, driver and software CD and a PCI-E power dongle.

At under nine inches, the ASUS EAH 4770 Formula should have no problems with most installations. While everyone's setup will differ, unless you have an unusual abundnance of components hanging out in the PCI Express area, installation should be painless.

The core features of the ASUS 4770 mirrors AMD's reference. The Radeon HD 4770 is built on a 40nm fabrication process, which is a first in the graphics industry and is composed of 826 million transistors. The Unified Superscalar Shader Architecture features 640 stream processing units which allow dynamic load balancing and resource allocation for vertex, geometry and pixel shaders. The stream processing units share a common instruction set and texture unit access for all types of shaders as well as dedicated branch execution units and texture address processors. There are 32 texture units capable of 24 GTexels per second. Naturally, Direct X 10.1 is supported. The GPU is capable of 960 GFLOPs. The default core speed of the Radeon HD 4770 is 750MHz.

While the market rate of the card is about $100, ASUS doesn't skimp on quality here as a key feature of their 4770 Formula is their . This feature is present in many of their products and is in a nutshell, elements to improve quality and longevity in their products. The ASUS 4770 Formula has solid capacitors to increase stability and a low RDS (on) MOSFET design which runs cooler than traditional. Their connections are EMI shielded and their chokes are covered for more efficient power to the board. Also, while not exactly obvious in the picture above, a black brace runs along the card for increased durability and stability.

While the length of the card should pose no issues, the ASUS 4770 Formula uses a large heatsink and fan combination. Designed with the shape of a Formula 1 race car, the cooler is effectively a two slot design. the Formula design is a lot more than just cool and pretty looks though. To start, the bearings of the fan are sealed from dust, which according to ASUS will increase the fan lifespan by 25%. While I have never had a fan fail on me personally, I know this has happened to other people. As you may be able to see in the picture above, the heatsinks are grooved, providing more surface area for heat to disapate.

There were no video adapters included with our sample and it seems unlikely they will be needed as the ASUS 4770 already has the three primary outputs that would cover the majority of uses. Moving from left to right, we have a digital HDMI output, a standard analog VGA output and a digital dual link DVI output.

This last shot shows off the covered chokes as well as the PCI-E power connection. AMD recommends a 450W power supply at the minimum with a 75W 6-pin connector. If you are running in Crossfire mode, they suggest a 550W PSU.