AMD Radeon HD 4770 On Linux

The reference cooler for the Radeon HD 4770 is similar to the Radeon HD 4870's reference cooler, albeit slightly scaled back. While some AIB vendors offering up the RV740 may be following the reference design, with this Sapphire model they went with a different cooling system. The Sapphire Radeon HD 4770 has a nicely sized fan (using a 2-pin connector) sitting atop a copper heatsink that cools the RV740 die. This cooler will block the expansion slot beneath the graphics card, but does not require the expansion slot itself. This GPU cooler is not exclusive to Sapphire as we have found the same exact cooler used by other AIBs.

There is no active cooling on the GDDR5 memory for this graphics card. Qimonda with a part number of IDGV51-05A1F1C manufactures the GDDR5 memory used on this Sapphire RV740. At the rear of the graphics card is a single 6-pin PCI Express power connector, which is required for operation. The RV740 should only consume about 80 Watts of power and is not as much as what is needed by the Radeon HD 4800 series, but still a single 6-pin PCI-E power connector is necessary.

The AMD/ATI Radeon HD 4770 is compatible with ATI CrossFire X for pairing up to two graphics cards together for sharing the rendering workload. This CrossFire feature has been supported in the Catalyst Linux driver since last year (ATI Radeon CrossFire On Linux).

The ports on the Radeon HD 4770 include two dual-link DVI and one HDTV output. Using the included adapters you can the DVI-D connectors for interfacing with VGA and HDMI devices. The RV740 is another AMD GPU that integrates its own APU, which can be used for providing audio with HDMI devices.