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It has been a while since we revisited the AMD HD7770 and I honestly still feel unimpressed with this specific range of cards. While the hardware is well suited for a performance oriented media center the enthusiast gaming audience will undoubtedly be yearning for something with a little more grunt.
To be fair, Sapphire has taken the HD7770 pretty much as far as we would expect with the Sapphire HD7770 Vapor X Overclock Edition.
The generous 100mhz overclock to 1,100mhz delivers noticeable gains, although the hardware is always going to be performance restricted due to the 128bit memory interface and limited shader count. We still can't comprehend why AMD felt it was a good idea to reduce the shader count from 800 on the HD6770 to 640 on the HD7770. The enhanced clock speeds will only deliver a specific level of improvement as the HD7770 is launching from a lower starting point.
Focusing specifically on the Sapphire HD7770 Vapor X Overclock Edition shows a significant improvement with noise levels … this card is actually one of the quietest actively cooled cards we have tested. This is due to the very clever fan profile, which has a tight 400 rpm modulation between 1,100 rpm and 1,500 rpm.
In the real world this means that the noise emissions only increase slightly between idle and load. It will be totally drowned out by a couple of case fans. The card responds well to overclocking, and we squeezed 1,230mhz from the core before instability would occur. Sadly this didn't translate into a huge real world performance boost due to the limited bandwidth of the hardware.
The Sapphire HD7770 Vapor X Overclock Edition doesn't appear to be on sale just yet, although the similarly specified single fan Sapphire OC Edition is currently being sold for £119.99 inc vat. We would assume the VaporX dual fan version to be closely priced.
The biggest competition today still comes from a last generation card which is sold by Amazon in the United Kingdom. The Sapphire HD6850 is available for £102.89 inc vat via Amazon and this would be our first choice at this price point.
Pros:
- Fantastic cooling performance.
- Almost silent.
- decent ‘out of the box' overclocks.
- More headroom available.
Cons:
- HD7770 isn't a significant improvement on the last generation HD6770.
- Sapphire HD6850 is a better deal.
Kitguru says: A great effort from Sapphire and certainly Worth Buying, but we still feel that AMD need to drop the baseline price of the HD7770.
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.