AMD HD7770 & HD7750 Roundup: Sapphire, XFX and HIS

1. Introduction2. Sapphire HD7750 Low Profile3. Sapphire HD7750 Low Profile (High Res Gallery)4. XFX HD7750 Black Edition Overclocked5. XFX HD7750 Black Edition OC (High Res Gallery)6. HIS HD7770 GHZ Edition IceQ X7. HIS HD7770 GHZ Edition IceQ X (High Res Gallery)8. Testing Methodology9. Synthetic: Unigine Heaven Benchmark10. Synthetic: 3DMark Vantage11. Synthetic: 3DMark 1112. Image Quality: HQV Benchmark 2.013. Gaming: F1 201114. Gaming: Alien V Predator15. Gaming: Resident Evil 516. Gaming: Far Cry 217. Gaming: Sleeping Dogs18. Gaming: Total War Shogun 2: Crossfire Performance19. Technical: Acoustics Performance20. Technical: Thermal Dynamics21. Technical: Power Consumption22. Technical: Sapphire HD7750 Overclocking23. Technical: XFX HD7750 Black Edition Overclocking24. Technical: HIS HD7770 GHZ Edition IceQ X overclocking25. Closing Thoughts26. View All Pages

When AMD initially launched the HD7750 and HD7770, I was a little disappointed.

When you compared these cards to the last generation HD6770 and HD6790 the new hardware was certainly more of a sideways step, rather than a leap forward. AMD improved power consumption and subsequent heat radiation, but as a viable upgrade scenario for a current HD67xx owner, they made little, if any sense.

6 months later, AMD have decided to cut prices of both HD7750 and HD7770, while offering a modest core clock increase. The focus point for AMD is to drop the price of the HD7750 to between £70-£80, which certainly makes it more interesting, especially for people on a budget.

Sadly there are still problems with this hardware that we can't escape. Our main concerns have been AMD's decision to reduce the shader processor count from 800 on the HD67xx to 640 on the HD7770 and 512 on the HD7750.

Realistically it won't matter how high you clock the new hardware via the improved manufacturing process, with less processing potential on tap the hardware will never reach the full potential.

As we noted before, the HD7750 is generally faster than the HD6770, but it could have been so much better if AMD had kept the original 800 shader count on the new hardware.

In my view, all the partners are starting from a crippled launching point, and fixing this crucial, primary problem is impossible.

The HIS HD7770 GHZ Edition IceQ X is a heavily modified card which is well built, attractively designed and offers improved performance when compared against the reference AMD design.

HIS have adopted their own IceQ X cooler which is an improvement over the previous ‘translucent' version which was loathed by a portion of the enthusiast audience. The new cooler is attractively finished and adopts a large centrally positioned fan.

The company have overclocked the core to 1,170mhz which helps improve the frame rate performance in all of the games we tested. The company have only left 30mhz of headroom on the card, so it is close to the limits and manually overclocking doesn't reap much of a reward.

Crossfire scaling is generally very good, taking the performance characteristics into a completely new playing field. Two of these cards are closely matched against the Sapphire HD7950 Vapor X Edition which is an impressive result.

Sadly, if HIS had an 800 shader version of this card to work with, the balance of performance against cost would be even better. A single card with 640 shaders can sometimes run out of steam at 1080p, so two are needed if you want to maximise the eye candy of the latest games. Still, the results are quite impressive overall, especially when factoring in power consumption.

My only concern with this specific card is the thermal curve under load. When gaming, the core peaks close to 80c and while not critical, it is much higher than we would expect from a custom, heatpipe driven design. A slightly more aggressive fan profile would have worked wonders, dropping temperatures by another 7-10c under load. Due to the large fan incorporated with this design, noise emissions would only have risen slightly.

We don't have confirmed pricing at time of publication, however we would expect this card to hit retail for around the £100-£110 inc vat mark.

Pros:

• Decent performance.
• good crossfire scaling.
• attractive styling.
• high overclock ‘out of the box'.

Cons:

• won't overclock much further.
• weak bundle.
• runs a little hot.

Kitguru says: The HIS HD7770 GHZ Edition IceQ X offers decent overall performance, but runs a little hot.

The XFX HD7750 Black Edition ‘Overclocked‘ has caused confusion. Before we started this review, we were informed by AMD PR that the new ‘reference' HD7750 would be clocked at 900mhz, giving a 10 percent performance boost over the previous iteration, with new aggressive pricing to push sales forward.

Not a new strategy, but a logical decision considering the more intense competition this summer.

You can imagine our surprise when we found out that this ‘overclocked' Black Edition is actually identical to the new reference card, with simply an enhanced cooler in place. The same 900mhz core clock speed, and 1,125mhz GDDR5 memory speeds are configured in the XFX bios. Scan are just taking pre-orders for this card today, so it looks to be a new design. Bizarre.

To make matters worse, we found this card would overclock to 1,052mhz, from the new 900mhz default setting. A healthy boost which helped enhance overall performance a little further. While every sample will be slightly different, we would imagine that XFX could easily sell these cards at a 975mhz-1GHZ clock speed, without having any long term failures.

That said, both reference AMD HD7750 cards we used to support this review where also able to overclock to the same 1,050mhz speeds. A potential HD7750 customer will be undoubtedly trying to save every penny, so a reference designed card might make more sense to reduce the cost, without a loss in ‘out of the box' frame rate performance.

There is no doubt that the XFX dual fan cooler is the best design on show today, delivering excellent acoustic and thermal performance results but AMD's reference card isn't noisy either (yes, that is rare I know), and the thermal performance is well within safety parameters.

Overall the XFX HD7750 Black Edition is a good card however the price is slightly outside the new £80 aggressive pricing threshold that AMD PR presented to us before this article. I would find this more acceptable if the card was supplied in a heavily overclocked state, however it is identical in performance to the new AMD 900mhz reference design.

Sadly, this isn't a Black Edition overclocked card at all, but a new reference clocked card with a modified cooler and subsequent price increase. Someone, somewhere has dropped the ball, but we aren't here to pass blame, just present the products in a fair way for you to make your own judgements.

This card will be available from SCAN shortly, pre-orders are being taken now for £83.98 inc vat. I would personally spend the extra £15 and get the much higher performing HIS HD7770 GHZ Edition IceQ X.

Pros:

• Great cooler.
• low noise levels.
• overclocks to over 1GHZ.

Cons:

• Priced higher.
• Clocked the same as the new AMD reference HD7750.
• weak bundle.

Kitguru says: A lovely looking card. Strangely it isn't overclocked based on the new AMD reference design speed of 900mhz. Therefore the ‘Black Edition – overclocked' moniker is questionable.

The Sapphire HD7750 Low Profile solution has impressed me the most today, for a variety of reasons.

Obviously this card has been designed for use within diminutive systems, including Mini ITX cases. The tiny physical footprint takes up almost no space, and unlike the other solutions on test today, the bundle is excellent.

Sapphire have included three video converter cables, including a mini DisplayPort and Mini HDMI cable which will cover a myriad of potential situations.

This card is also Eyefinity capable, meaning you can power three high definition monitors within a work based environment.

I hooked up three Dell U2410 screens to this card and it coped admirably, although it wouldn't be suitable for gaming. Sapphire have decided to remove the Crossfire connector which also limits gaming potential down the line.

This card is primarily designed for a new high definition media center, with the capabilities to power many of the leading games. Surprisingly I found that our sample would manually overclock to 1,000mhz via Sapphire's TriXX software without increasing voltage.

When we factor in that this card doesn't even require a 6 pin PCI power cable it is genuinely remarkable. It is the only card on offer today which demands less than 40 watts when gaming, an extremely efficient design from the Sapphire team.

Normally when I see a graphics card adopting such a small fan, it can set off alarm bells in my head. If the profile isn't carefully configured, they can spin very fast, emitting a lot of noise and ruining the whole point of a small, power efficient media card. Thankfully Sapphire have spent some time optimising this board and the small fan spins very slowly and generates a very low level ‘hum' under load, which is barely audible.

If I was building a media center I would without hesitation buy one of these cards for my own system. It is capable of powering many games at reasonable settings, and there is plenty of overclocking headroom if the need arises.

It is certainly no powerhouse gaming ‘tour de force', but from the cards we tested today, this HD7750 makes the most sense to me. These cards are all ideal for media acceleration and multi screen support.

The Sapphire HD7750 Low Profile is the most efficient and has been designed specifically for this task.

As our testing has highlighted, this low profile solution is capable of smooth 1080p Direct X 10 gaming, even with Anti Aliasing enabled. Far Cry 2, Resident Evil 5 and Sleeping Dogs for instance are all perfectly playable at 1080p with anti aliasing enabled.

The Sapphire HD7750 Low Profile solution is our round up winner today. This card is not yet available for purchase however Sapphire have informed us that it should retail for £80 inc vat.

Pros:

• Extremely tiny.
• does not require any power cable.
• our sample overclocked to 1,000mhz.
• low power drain.
• strong bundle.
• quiet.

Cons:

• no Crossfire connector.

Kitguru says: A fantastic little card, ideal for media center adoption and less demanding gaming requirements.

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