Sapphire have a well earned reputation for creating some of the highest quality AMD graphics cards. In February we reviewed their single fan HD7770 1GHZ Overclock Edition and today we are looking at their latest overclocked HD7770 with Vapor-X cooling solution.
The new Sapphire HD7770 Vapor X Overclock Edition is their first card in this generation to use the Sapphire Vapor Chamber cooling technology. This core on this card is overclocked to 1,100mhz and the memory runs at 1,300mhz (5.2GB/s effective).
Sapphire were the first company to introduce Vapor Chamber Technology on graphics cards. It was first launched in 2007 with the HD3870 ATOMIC Edition graphics card and was then farmed across into the HD3870 and HD4870 TOXIC Editions and the Vapor X series. If you are as old as me then you will remember this with particular fondness.
Product | Sapphire HD7770 Vapor X Overclock Edition | AMD HD7770 1GHZ |
Process | 28nm | 28nm |
Transistors |
1.5 billion
|
1.5 billion |
Engine Clock |
1,100 mhz
|
1000mhz |
Stream Processors |
640
|
640 |
Compute Performance | 1.28 TFLOPS | 1.28 TFLOPS |
Texture Units | 40 | 40 |
Texture Filrate | 40.0 GT/s | 40.0 GT/s |
ROPs | 16 | 16 |
Pixel Filrate | 16.0 GP/s | 16.0 GP/s |
Z/Stencil | 64 | 64 |
Memory Type | 1GB GDDR5 | 1GB GDDR5 |
Memory Clock | 1,300mhz | 1,125mhz |
Memory Data Rate | 5.2 Gbps | 4.5 Gbps |
Memory Bandwidth | 72 GB/s | 72 GB/s |
Sapphire have pushed the GHZ edition core by 100mhz to 1,100mhz, and the memory has also been boosted from 1,125mhz to 1,300mhz, a substantial increase.
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.