HIS HD7750 iCooler Graphics Card Review

1. Introduction2. HIS HD7750 iCooler3. HIS HD7750 iCooler (Super High Res Gallery)4. Testing Methodology5. Synthetic: Unigine Heaven Benchmark6. Synthetic: 3DMark Vantage7. Synthetic: 3DMark 118. Synthetic: HQV Benchmark 2.09. Gaming: F1 201110. Gaming: HomeFront11. Gaming: Alien V Predator12. Gaming: Dead Island13. Gaming: Tom Clancy HAWX 214. Gaming: Resident Evil 515. Gaming: Far Cry 216. Gaming: Total War Shogun 217. Technical: Acoustics Performance18. Technical: Thermal Dynamics19. Technical: Power Consumption20. Technical: Overclocking21. Closing Thoughts22. View All Pages

Our other editorials today focus on the new AMD HD7770 1GHZ graphics card, which is the higher end model in the 77xx range. In this review however we look at the HIS HD7750, a card which aims to target the budget aware gaming audience.

HIS haven't quite yet earned the reputation of Sapphire or XFX in the high end sector, although we have positively rated their IceQ coolers over the last year. How will they tackle this modestly priced budget solution?

Their HD7750 graphics card features a proprietary cooler with the ‘iCooler' moniker. Clearly someone in the company is an Apple lover.

Above the HIS HD7750 next to the reference AMD HD7750 solution.

This iCooler isn't a dramatic overhaul of the reference AMD design, however HIS have opted for a larger fan which in theory should offer lower noise emissions and superior cooling efficiency at the same speeds.

Product	AMD HD7750	AMD HD7770
Process	28nm	28nm
Transistors	1.5 billion	1.5 billion
Engine Clock	800mhz	1000mhz
Stream Processors	512	640
Compute Performance	819 GFLOPS	1.28 TFLOPS
Texture Units	32	40
Texture Filrate	25.6 GT/s	40.0 GT/s
ROPs	16	16
Pixel Filrate	12.8GP/s	16.0 GP/s
Z/Stencil	64	64
Memory Type	1GB GDDR5	1GB GDDR5
Memory Clock	1,125mhz	1,125mhz
Memory Data Rate	4.5 Gbps	4.5 Gbps
Memory Bandwidth	72 GB/s	72 GB/s

The HD7750 is built on the latest 28nm manufacturing process, but it is clocked at 800mhz, which is 200mhz slower than the more expensive HD7770. The card has 512 stream processors, down from 640 on the HD7770 and 32 texture units, down from 40 texture units on the HD7770.

The HIS HD7750 arrives in a box featuring a rather bland 3D rendered sword on the front. Let's move on quickly.

The HD7750 doesnt really ship with a ‘bundle', just a video converter and an instruction leaflet on how to plug the card into the PCI e slot.

The HIS HD7750 iCooler is basically a black shroud, and large blue fan, resting on top of a small heatsink underneath. The card is built around a blue PCB.

When we looked at our sample, we noticed the black shroud wasn't attached properly (see above). It is only held in place by four small plastic ‘catch' levers and can actually be forced out of position with only a little pressure. Best to check your own card when you first remove it from the box.

The card is equipped with a DVI, HDMI and full sized Displayport connector. It doesnt require any PCIe power connector for operation.

The cooler isn't substantial by physical stature, but this GPU core shouldn't produce much heat anyway.

This HD7750 uses 1GB of GDDR5 Hynix H5GQ2H24MFR memory which is the same as the HD7770 cards we received for review.

A basic overview of the HIS HD7750 featuring the Cape Verde 28nm GPU Core. This card has 512 unified shaders, 16 ROPS and 1GB of GDDR5 memory connected via a 128 bit memory interface. The core runs at 800mhz and the memory at 1,125mhz (4.5Gbps effective).

On this page we present some super high resolution images of the product taken with the 24.5MP Nikon D3X camera and 24-70mm ED lens. These will take much longer to open due to the dimensions, especially on slower connections. If you use these pictures on another site or publication, please credit Kitguru.net as the owner/source. You can right click and ‘save as’ to your computer to view later.

To test today we are using our long standing Core i7 970 system, which is overclocked. We have a variety of hardware benchmarked on this system within the last couple of months which will make for an interesting market comparison. Our HD6850 died a short while ago and we couldn't include results today.

Test System:
Processor: Core i7 970 @ 4.6ghz
Graphics: HIS HD7750 iCooler
Cooling: Coolit Vantage
Motherboard: MSI X58A-GD65
Chassis: Thermaltake Level 10 GT
Power Supply: Corsair AX1200
Memory: 6GB ADATA @ 2133mhz 9-10-9-32
Storage: Kingston SSDNow V+ 512GB Gen 2 SSD (Storage) / Crucial RealSSD C300 256GB (OS boot)

Comparison Cards:
HD7970
HD7950
HD6990 (880 core)
HD6970
HD6950
HD6870
Sapphire HD7770 1GHZ OC Edition
HD7770
HD6790
HD6770
HD6670
GTX590 SLi
GTX590
GTX580 SLi
GTX580
GTX570

Monitors: Dell U3011

Software:
Windows 7 Enterprise 64 bit
Unigine Heaven Benchmark
3DMark Vantage
3DMark 11
Fraps Professional
Steam Client
FurMark

Games:
HomeFront
Alien V Predator
Dead Island
Tom Clancy HAWX 2
Resident Evil 5
Far Cry 2
F1 2011
Total War: Shogun 2

All the latest BIOS updates and drivers are used during testing. We perform generally under real world conditions, meaning KitGuru tests games across five closely matched runs and then average out the results to get an accurate median figure. If we use scripted benchmarks, they are mentioned on the relevant page.

Some game descriptions are edited from Wikipedia.

Unigine provides an interesting way to test hardware. It can be easily adapted to various projects due to its elaborated software design and flexible toolset. A lot of their customers claim that they have never seen such extremely-effective code, which is so easy to understand.

Heaven Benchmark is a DirectX 11 GPU benchmark based on advanced Unigine engine from Unigine Corp. It reveals the enchanting magic of floating islands with a tiny village hidden in the cloudy skies. Interactive mode provides emerging experience of exploring the intricate world of steampunk.

Efficient and well-architected framework makes Unigine highly scalable:

• Multiple API (DirectX 9 / DirectX 10 / DirectX 11 / OpenGL) render
• Cross-platform: MS Windows (XP, Vista, Windows 7) / Linux
• Full support of 32bit and 64bit systems
• Multicore CPU support
• Little / big endian support (ready for game consoles)
• Powerful C++ API
• Comprehensive performance profiling system
• Flexible XML-based data structures

We use the following settings: 1920×1080 resolution. Anti Aliasing off. Anisotrophy 4, Tessellation normal. Shaders High. Stereo 3D disabled. API: Direct X 11.

AMD's latest HD7000 series has improved tessellation performance and the HD7750 manages to outperform the HD6790 by a single frame per second.

Futuremark released 3DMark Vantage, on April 28, 2008. It is a benchmark based upon DirectX 10, and therefore will only run under Windows Vista (Service Pack 1 is stated as a requirement) and Windows 7. This is the first edition where the feature-restricted, free of charge version could not be used any number of times. 1280×1024 resolution was used with performance settings.

Direct X 10 performance with this synthetic engine is rather disappointing, scoring just under 10,000 points, almost identical to the last generation HD6770.

3DMark 11 is designed for testing DirectX 11 hardware running on Windows 7 and Windows Vista the benchmark includes six all new benchmark tests that make extensive use of all the new features in DirectX 11 including tessellation, compute shaders and multi-threading.

After running the tests 3DMark gives your system a score with larger numbers indicating better performance. Trusted by gamers worldwide to give accurate and unbiased results, 3DMark 11 is the best way to test DirectX 11 under game-like loads.

If you want to learn more about this benchmark, or to buy it yourself, head over to this page.

Synthetic Direct X 11 performance isn't that impressive, scoring 2,696 points, placing it slightly behind the last generation HD6770.

HQV Benchmark 2.0 is an updated version of the original tool and it consists of various video clips and test patterns which are designed to evalute motion correction, de-interlacing, decoding, noise reduction, detail enhancement and film cadence detection.

There are two versions of the program, standard definition on DVD and high definition on Bluray. As our audience will be concentrating on HD content so will we.

This has a total of 39 video tests which is increased from 23 in the original and the scoring is also up from a total of 130 to 210. As hardware and software gets more complicated, the software has been tuned to make sure we can thoroughly maximise our analysis.

Read our initial analysis over here

	HIS HD7750 iCooler
Dial	4
Dial with static pattern	5
Gray Bars	5
Violin	5
Stadium 2:2	5
Stadium 3:2	5
Horizontal Text Scroll	5
Vertical Text Scroll	5
Transition to 3:2 Lock	5
Transition to 2:2 Lock	0
2:2:2:4 24 FPS DVCAM Video	5
2:3:3:2 24 FPS DVCam Video	5
3:2:3:2:2 24 FOS Vari-Speed	5
5:5 FPS Animation	5
6:4 12 FPS Animation	5
8:7 8 FPS Animation	5
Interlace Chroma Problem (ICP)	5
Chroma Upsampling Error (CUE)	5
Random Noise: Sailboat	5
Random Noise: Flower	5
Random Noise: Sunrise	5
Random Noise: Harbour Night	5
Scrolling Text	5
Roller Coaster	5
Ferris Wheel	5
Bridge Traffic	5
Text Pattern/ Scrolling Text	5
Roller Coaster	5
Ferris Wheel	5
Bridge Traffic	5
Luminance Frequency Bands	5
Chrominance Frequency Bands	5
Vanishing Text	5
Resolution Enhancement	15
Theme Park	5
Driftwood	5
Ferris Wheel	5
Skin Tones	7
Total	196

A score of 196 points is class leading right now, the ideal solution for high definition media playback on a big screen.

F1 2011 is the newest Direct X 11 racing game from industry pioneers CodeMasters. The 2011 Formula One season is the 62nd FIA Formula One season. The original calendar consisted of twenty rounds, including the inaugural running of the Indian Grand Prix before the cancellation of the Bahrain Grand Prix. Pirelli returns to the sport as tyre supplier for all teams, taking over from Bridgestone. Red Bull Racing are the reigning Constructor’s Champions. Red Bull Racing’s Sebastian Vettel is the defending Drivers’ Champion, one of five World Champions appearing on the grid.

At these settings the card maintains playable frame rates, although it is borderline, dropping to 28 frames per second a few times. Performance is smoother than the previous generation HD6770 in regards to minimum frame rates, although the average frame rate is identical.

Homefront’s PC version was developed by Digital Extremes, a Canadian developer responsible for numerous Unreal Tournament games and Bioshock ports. It received mixed reports, although Kitguru really likes the single player aspect of this title. The engine isn’t the most demanding on the market, but it requires decent partnering hardware for solid frame rates at 1080p.

The game is not playable at these settings on the HIS HD7750, dropping below 20 frames per second a few times. Performance is only slightly better than the HD6770 which is disappointing.

Aliens V Predator has proved to be a big seller since the release and Sega have taken the franchise into new territory after taking it from Sierra. AVP is a Direct X 11 supported title and delivers not only advanced shadow rendering but high quality tessellation for the cards on test today.

To test the cards we used a 1080p resolution with DX11, Texture Quality Very High, MSAA Samples 1, 16 af, ambient occulsion on, shadow complexity high, motion blur on. We use this with most of our graphics card testing so cards are comparable throughout reviews.

This Direct X 11 title is very difficult to power and the HIS HD7750 can't maintain playable frame rates. The resolution and image quality settings would need to be reduced to play this title. The performance is slightly worse than the HD6770 from the last generation.

Dead Island is a first person horror action-adventure video game developed by Techland and published by Deep Silver for Microsoft Windows. It is centered on the challenge of survival on a zombie-infested open world island with a major emphasis on melee combat. It is rather good fun, for a short while, but it becomes repetitive.

No problems powering this undemanding engine at 1080p, although the HD6770 manages to outperform the HIS HD7750 by a couple of frames per second.

Tom Clancy’s H.A.W.X. 2 is an arcade-style flight action game developed by Ubisoft Romania and published by Ubisoft. After the events of the first game, the H.A.W.X squadron is sent to Middle East, where a high level of violence is being registered, and the appearance of various insurgents leaders in various hotspots. The team also has to investigate the mysterious disappearance of Russian nuclear weapons. The player will be controlling three groups: one American (Hunter), one British (Munro) and one Russian (Sokov), each with its own pilots and supporting characters. There will also be references to other characters in the Tom Clancy universe.

We are testing in full DX11 mode with all settings to maximum.

Playable frame rates throughout the test environment, dropping to 33 fps once. The HIS HD7750 slots in between the HD6770 and HD6790 with this particular engine at these settings.

Resident Evil 5, known in Japan as Biohazard 5, is a survival horror third-person shooter video game developed and published by Capcom. The game is the seventh installment in the Resident Evil survival horror series, and was released on March 5, 2009 in Japan and on March 13, 2009 in North America and Europe for the PlayStation 3 and Xbox 360. A Windows version of the game was released on September 15, 2009 in North America, September 17 in Japan and September 18 in Europe. Resident Evil 5 revolves around Chris Redfield and Sheva Alomar as they investigate a terrorist threat in Kijuju, a fictional town in Africa.

Within its first three weeks of release, the game sold over 2 million units worldwide and became the best-selling game of the franchise in the United Kingdom. As of December, 2009, Resident Evil 5 has sold 5.3 million copies worldwide since launch, becoming the best selling Resident Evil game ever made.

The Direct X 10 powered Resident Evil 5 still looks good and proves no problems for the HIS HD6750 iCooler to power at 1080p. The card delivers a couple of extra frames per second when compared against the HD6770.

Far Cry 2 (commonly abbreviated as “FC2 or “fc2″) is an open-ended first-person shooter developed by Ubisoft Montreal and published by Ubisoft. It was released on October 21, 2008 in North America and on October 23, 2008 in Europe and Australia. It was made available on Steam on October 22, 2008. Crytek, the developers of the original game, were not involved in the development of Far Cry 2.

Ubisoft has marketed Far Cry 2 as the true sequel to Far Cry, though the sequel has very few noticeable similarities to the original game. Instead, it features completely new characters and setting, as well as a new style of gameplay that allows the player greater freedom to explore different African landscapes such as deserts, jungles, and savannas. The game takes place in a modern-day East African nation in a state of anarchy and civil war. The player takes control of a mercenary on a lengthy journey to locate and assassinate “The Jackal,” a notorious arms dealer.

Far Cry 2 is still a popular game and the open world environment can be taxing on even the latest hardware available today.

Settings: 1920×1200, D3D10, Disable Artificial Intelligence(No), Full Screen, Anti-Aliasing(8x), VSync(No), Overall Quality(Ultra High), Vegetation(Very High), Shading(Ultra High), Terrain(Ultra High), Geometry(Ultra High), Post FX(High), Texture(Ultra High), Shadow(Ultra High), Ambient(High), Hdr(Yes), Bloom(Yes), Fire(Very High), Physics(Very High), RealTrees(Very High).

Performance is borderline at these settings, with the frame rate dropping a few times to 25-26. These results are slightly better than the HD6770 but worse than the HD6790.

Shogun 2 is set in 16th-century feudal Japan, in the aftermath of the Ōnin War. The country is fractured into rival clans led by local warlords, each fighting for control. The player takes on the role of one of these warlords, with the goal of dominating other factions and claiming his rule over Japan. The standard edition of the game will feature a total of eight factions (plus a ninth faction for the tutorial), each with a unique starting position and different political and military strengths.

We are using the built in benchmark which is available via the STEAM client for this game.

If you want to play this game at 1080p then you need to start spending more money, because the HIS HD7750 cannot maintain playable frame rates. At 720p the card maintains an average of 56 fps, although it does drop to the early 30's from time to time.

We have changed our method of measuring noise levels. We have built a system inside a Lian Li chassis with no case fans and have used a fanless cooler on our CPU. We are using a heatpipe based passive power supply and an Intel SSD to keep noise levels to a minimum. The motherboard is also passively cooled. This gives us a build with completely passive cooling and it means we can measure noise of just the graphics card inside the system when we run looped 3dMark tests.

Ambient noise in the room is around 20-25dBa. We measure from a distance of around 1 meter from the closed chassis and 4 foot from the ground to mirror a real world situation.

Why do this? Well this means we can eliminate secondary noise pollution in the test room and concentrate on only the video card. It also brings us slightly closer to industry standards, such as DIN 45635.

KitGuru noise guide
10dBA – Normal Breathing/Rustling Leaves
20-25dBA – Whisper
30dBA – High Quality Computer fan
40dBA – A Bubbling Brook, or a Refrigerator
50dBA – Normal Conversation
60dBA – Laughter
70dBA – Vacuum Cleaner or Hairdryer
80dBA – City Traffic or a Garbage Disposal
90dBA – Motorcycle or Lawnmower
100dBA – MP3 player at maximum output
110dBA – Orchestra
120dBA – Front row rock concert/Jet Engine
130dBA – Threshold of Pain
140dBA – Military Jet takeoff/Gunshot (close range)
160dBA – Instant Perforation of eardrum

The HIS HD7750 iCooler solution is quieter than the reference card, peaking around 32 dBa under full gaming load. Barely audible above a quality case fan.

The tests were performed in a controlled air conditioned room with temperatures maintained at a constant 24c – a comfortable environment for the majority of people reading this.

Idle temperatures were measured after sitting at the desktop for 30 minutes. Load measurements were acquired by playing Crysis Warhead for 30 minutes and measuring the peak temperature. We also have included Furmark results, recording maximum temperatures throughout a 30 minute stress test. All fan settings were left on automatic.

The HD7750 doesn't have a very hot running core however the HIS iCooler improves on reference temperatures by around 3c. Not a huge amount, but at least the noise levels are also lower.

To test power consumption today we are using a Keithley Integra unit and we measure power consumption from the VGA card inputs, not the system wide drain. We measure results while gaming in Crysis Warhead and record the results.

In such an energy aware climate, AMD are making a big deal out of their new ‘ZeroCore Power’ technology. Many solutions today use power gating, clock gating and memory compression to reduce idle power requirements, but ZeroCore power technology can completely power down the core GPU while the rest of the system remains active.

The HD7750 is certainly an efficient graphics card as it only demands 42 watts under gaming load. Great results.

We normally use the Sapphire TriXX overclocking software for our reviews, but this launch was slightly rushed and Sapphire didn’t have a version ready to support the HD7750 when we started these tests. We therefore reverted to AMD’s Catalyst Control Center.

Overclocking for the HD7750 is limited in Catalyst Control Center, and while we could max out both sliders, we noticed some slight artifacting and flickering when stressing the card via Unigine Heaven. We backed down to 870mhz core and 1225mhz via the GDDR5 memory which was the best we could achieve without any problem.

Manually overclocking the HD7750 increased the score by 300 points to 2,929 points.

I had high hopes for this product before starting the review but now that I have finished, I am finding it difficult to work up any level of enthusiasm for the closing thoughts.

AMD's HD7750 has been designed as a low cost discrete solution for light gaming and high definition multimedia duties. One of the primary focus points for AMD has been on maintaining a very low power drain and subsequent heat discharge. In this regard they have triumphed because the hardware takes all the power it needs direct from the PCI e slot. We measured just over 40 watts when gaming, which is undoubtedly impressive.

The latest AMD HD7000 architecture has augmented tessellation performance, clearly evident with results gathered from the Unigine Heaven Benchmark. The HD7750 manages to outperform the HD6790 in this specific test, even if only by a single frame per second. Sadly when we start to measure real world gaming performance the HD7750 struggles to pull away from the HD6770, indistinguishable in a combination of synthetic and real world tests we adopted today. The problem is connected to the stream processors, which have been castrated from 800 on the HD6770 to 512 on the HD7750. High clock speeds can only partially compensate for this, rather than push the card into an elevated low cost performance sector for 2012.

This places HIS in a rather poor launching point, after all how can they dramatically improve on this product for launch? To their credit they included a modified cooler, which is better than the reference solution, although we don't like the plastic locking mechanism at all. Even slight pressure on the shroud can ‘unclip' one side, which is not very reassuring.

The major redeeming feature would be the price, but sadly AMD appear to have dropped the ball again. We were instructed just before launch that this card will ship for £85 pre vat in the UK, which puts the cost at £100 inc vat. At this price point the card is up against the slightly less expensive, and superior HD6790. This card is still available in many UK stores and offers a higher level of overall performance for slightly less money.

The horror story for AMD doesn't end there however as the vastly superior HD6850 can be picked up for £103.99 on Overclockers. Can't get any worse? Well Asus are releasing a HD6850 with Direct CU V2 cooler for £89.99 inc vat.

To make the HD7750 a viable value for money product, I would like to see this card available for around £80, not £100. AMD need to get their pricing sorted.

Pros:

• good power consumption.
• HIS have improved the cooler.
• low heat output

Cons:

• AMD are battling against their last generation of hardware, still available and faster (such as HD6850).
• plastic cooler holding clips are not good.

Kitguru says: HIS have created a solid version of this product, but AMD have overpriced it at £100. Drop the price to £80 inc vat then it makes more sense.

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