The Radeon HD 4890 card aside, AMD isn’t very fond of partners overclocking its graphics card from factory. This is also why we haven’t seen any factory overclocked version of Radeon HD 4770 yet. ASUS intends to change this as it has announced two different models of the new mid-range card. ASUS EAH4770/HTDI/512MD5 is the standard model, which is pretty much the same as the reference, but ASUS EAH4770 TOP/HTDI/512MD5 comes with overclocked GPU and memory out of the box.
ASUS’ Top model sports a GPU frequency of 800MHz and 3.4GHz memory clock, a marginal increase from the reference frequencies; 750MHz and 3.2GHz. But it has been blessed with ASUS Voltage Tweak technology, recognized from the HD 4890 series.
Together with ASUS SmartDoctor software the technology can increase the GPU voltage of ASUS Radeon HD 4770 Top from 0.95V to 1.2V, and turn up the frequencies to 971MHz GPU and 4600MHz memory. That’s a substantially higher clock frequency of both GPU and memory, which according to ASUS will result in up to 35% better performance. That should be more than enough to take down Radeon HD 4850, which could explain AMD’s negative attitude toward factory overclocked cards.
How remaining partners will react, including AMD, to this we don’t know. As a consumer you can only hope that more follows in ASUS’ footsteps. ASUS’ standard model of Radeon HD 4770 costs around $110 in stores, but the Top model is a bit trickier to locate.
