First of all, thanks a lot to HIS for giving us the opportunity to review this video card.

About HIS

HIS is a graphics card company that primarily builds ATI-based products. They are a Christian company as well. This is part of their company statement: HIS was established in 1987 with the mission to produce the highest quality graphic cards in the industry. Besides strong devotion to excellent products and services, HIS has been conducting business with the aim to "Glorifying God". Honesty and integrity are the two key principals of how HIS are conducted. Ethical business practice has been an everyday commitment to our clients, vendors, and investors. Most of us pick a video card based purely on chipset and price. It\'s good to see HIS is more than a typical ATI card manufacturer - they have a mission that CCG can agree with. Even so, this review is based on the quality of the product reviewed; no unnecessary bias has gone into the review process.

About the HIS HD4770

750mhz core clock
512MB GDDR5 128bit interface
Memory Clock 3200bps/MHz
PCI Express x16, takes 2 slots
Direct X 10.1 support
4.1 Shader Model
2.1 Open GL support
HDMI,DVI, HDTV 1080p support

The Comparison MSI 8800GT (factory over clocked)

660mhz core clock
512MB GDDR3 256bit interface
Memory Clock 1900bps/MHz
Shader clock 1650MHz
PCI Express x16, takes 2 slots
Direct X 10 support
Open GL 2 support
Dual DVI

Benchmark System Intel Quad Core Q6600 OC\'d to 3.23GHz
EVGA 780i motherboard
Gskill 8GB DDR2 1000
WD 120GB 7200RPM
Creative Labs X-fi We ran the benchmarks using a 64 bit version of Windows 7 Ultimate build 7100. Windows seems to prefer the HD4770 card giving it a rating of 6.1 for desktop and gaming graphics. The 8800GT was only given a 5.9 in those categories. All of these benchmarks are run at 1920x1200 wide screen resolution.

Unreal Tournament 3

The Unreal engine is known for its beauty and hunger for powerful video cards to run the latest games. For this benchmark we used UT3 version 2.1 (black edition) and we disabled the hardware physics support. The anisotropic filtering was set to 16X and motion blur was enabled. The 8800GT is the clear winner here.

FarCry 2

The Dunia engine is what powered the African based FarCry 2 game. The detail and explosion effects are amazing. We cranked all the settings to Very High and the HD4770 took the lead with a minimum frame rate of 45 and a maximum of 71FPS.

Enemy Territory: Quake Wars

The quake engine utilizes Open GL and the HD4770 has an 11FPS lead over the Nvidia 8800GT. This benchmark has antialiasing and anisotropic filtering set to 4X. The detail was set to High Quality and soft particles were disabled.

Half-Life 2: Episode 2

I was surprised to see the results in this benchmark. I thought the 4770 would take the lead since Valve prefers ATI technology for their Source engine. Maximum quality was used, motion blur and bilinear filtering was enabled.

World in Conflict

We ran this benchmark with very high detail and the average frames per second were only different by one between these two cards. The 4770 had a max of 69 with a minimum of 13 while the 8800GT had a minimum of 8 and a max of 58. The graphics in this game look amazing.

Crysis Warhead

The latest Crytek engine has been notorious for bring many systems down to their knees. These cards struggled and again only had a difference of one frame per second. This benchmark was run under the Very High setting which is not recommended for these cards unless you SLI or Cross-Fire them.

Conclusion

The HD4770 is a great card for around $110. It can handle many of the popular games out there and definitely holds its own against similarly priced Nvidia cards. If you plan on playing Crysis with it you\'ll have to turn the graphics down a notch or two. This is an excellent card choice for multimedia and HD movie watching. The built in HDMI adapter was a nice addition. There are two DVI ports and a VGA adapter as well. If you\'re looking for a low budget gaming and multimedia card check out the HIS HD4770.