Sapphire HD7770 1GHZ Overclock Edition Review

Allan 'Zardon' Campbell February 15, 2012 Graphics, Highlights-new

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.

Test System:
Processor: Core i7 970 @ 4.6ghz
Graphics: Sapphire HD7770 1GHZ OC Edition
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
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.

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12 comments

Raymond
February 15, 2012 at 8:27 am

Good card, but I cant help but feel this range of cards from AMD is rather dull and lifeless. why remove alot of the shaders on the cards? makes no sense to go back a step. negates the gains from the manufacturing process and increasing the clock speeds
Ch3if
February 15, 2012 at 8:36 am

Very dull launch day, they need to drop the prices.
Fank
February 15, 2012 at 8:37 am

Sapphire always do good coolers, but id love to know who in AMD thought it was a good idea to lose 140 stream processors on the new card? the HD6770 had 800 !
Samuel
February 15, 2012 at 11:31 am

Crossfire performance is really good. id like to see results from two of the OC’d models.
Mark
February 15, 2012 at 11:33 am

great cooler, but the card undeneath hasn’t hit the spot im afraid.
Muppett
February 15, 2012 at 1:07 pm

I can’t see anybody in the UK listing a Sapphire SKU with 1150Mhz Core clock…
see Scan/Dabs have a 1120 listed…
Zardon
February 15, 2012 at 2:14 pm

Hi Muppett, you aren’t the first person to ask me about this, and ive contacted Sapphire today and they told me that SCAN have the core clock speed listed at the older speeds. It should be 1150mhz. you will hopefully see this change on SCAN Shortly.

Thanks for letting us know.
veer
April 25, 2012 at 2:43 am

See this for more information http://www.futurehardware.com/latest-tech-news/737.htm
Meh
May 16, 2012 at 9:06 am

This card works best underclocked if you have a clocked version, some of the overclocked 7770’s have an odd issue that causes your screen to flicker. Performance wise its a good mid/entry range card but a complete failure from the 6000 series. One thing does stand out about the 7000 series though, their using better cooling which would be a nice addage if only the prices would drop.

@Frank I would guess it has to do with the dye shrinkage from 40nm scale to 28nm, I would have settled for a thousand stream processors if it meant abandoning such a useless shrinkage. My guess they shrunk the dye in order to control heat and leverage power out put. Which is just piss poor marketing strategy if you ask me.