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As we would expect, Sapphire don't feature the card on the front of the box, but instead have a very tasty 3D rendered lady in the center. She is either hunting polar bears or is out to kick some ass, James Bond style.
The bundle includes a power adapter, a video adapter and an HDMI cable.
The last overclocked Sapphire HD7770 we reviewed featured a large, single, centrally placed fan. The Vapor X Edition has two slightly smaller fans placed across the full length of the aqua blue PCB.
The card demands a single 6 pin PCI e power connector for operation. It is Crossfire capable in a 2 way configuration only. If you want three way or four way Crossfire you need to aim higher up AMD’s product range. A little disappointing as three or four of these cards might make for an interesting, lower cost Crossfire configuration.
The Sapphire HD7770 Vapor X Overclock Edition features dual DVI ports, an HDMI port and a DisplayPort. It is Eyefinity capable.
The cooler is a substantial design, based around two thick copper heatpipes, which connect to a copper core. The more observant among you will notice that this card doesn't use Hynix memory. Sapphire are using Elpida GDDR5 – marked W2032BBBG.
An overview of the Sapphire HD7770 Vapor X Overclock Edition in GPUz. This 28nm Cape Verde core runs 100mhz faster than the reference card @ 1,100mhz. The card features 16 ROPS, 640 Unified shaders and 1GB of GDDR5 memory running at 1300mhz via a 128 bit interface.
Great card, but I agree, the HD7770 seem slightly overpriced as a whole. Im not completely sold, even if Sapphire have pushed it to the limit, as they always do.
That is a sexy looking little card, the colours are great. reminds me a little of the XFX DD cards !
That said, I think id rather spend £25 more and get the next model up. the shader count is very low (640) and it does impact performance. If they had kept 800 shaders like 6770 but increased the clocks with the new manufacturing process it would have been stronger.
Sapphire make good cards, thats not the question. I dont know how you can give this 8 out of 10 as the whole 7770 range is butchered and no better than the last generation. Sapphire have you in their pocket.
I wouldnt be so hard on it, the noise levels alone are really useful for a compact media center system for a living room. A single slot version would be nice, but it wouldnt be as quiet.
Who buys a sub-midrange card to play games at 2560×1600 and 1920×1080? Wouldn’t 1600×1050 or 1440×900 be a more realistic resolution?
I agree with the comment who buys a sub midrange card….. However, it seems to be just what I may be looking for. As I dont play games, there appears to be sufficient reserve performance if required and, most importantly, the power/ wattage used will not break the bank.