As we are getting close to the official launch of AMD's newest ATI Radeon HD 4770 card, preliminary tests are starting to appear around the net.

The card's cooler is identical to the one on the HIS card we showed you earlier, and this is apparently ATI's reference design. It's quite strange as ATI used a different design in its presentations, but it's still a US $99 card, and ATI apparently had to cut some corners.

The card has 512MB of GDDR5 memory paired up with a 128-bit memory interface, has 640 stream processors and works at 750MHz for the core and 800MHz for memory. The cooler apparently does what it's supposed to do and keeps the temp at 72 degrees Celsius under load, while the fan spins at 42 percent.

The card gets P7408 in 3DMark Vantage and 12,042 marks in 3DMark06 on a testbed based on Intel Core 2 Quad Q9550 CPU and 4GB of DDR2-800 memory. You can find those results here. The guys from Expreview also did a 3DMark Vantage test with its Connect3D Radeon HD 4770 and when paired with a Core i7 platform it scores P8086 in the same 3DMark Vantage test. You can find Expreview's test here.

The card looks good for now, as its performance is quite close to the HD 4850, and keep in mind we are still talking about a $99 card.