AMD Radeon HD 7770 GHz Edition Video Card Review

Introduction

The new Radeon HD 7770 GHz Edition, which is being released today, is a mainstream video card based on the latest graphics architecture from AMD, dubbed “Graphics Core Next” or simply “GCN,” which supports the new PCI Express 3.0 connection and the latest DirectX version (11.1).

For a detailed explanation of the new features present on this latest architecture, please read our Radeon HD 7970 review.

AMD is also releasing a cheaper version of this video card, the Radeon HD 7750, which we will cover in a separate review. The Radeon HD 7750 and Radeon HD 7770 use the codename “Cape Verde.” By the way, this country is located in the Northern Hemisphere, not in the Southern. (This new GPU architecture from AMD used by these video cards is codenamed “Southern Islands.”)

At USD 160, the new Radeon HD 7770 GHz Edition is available with the same price range as the Radeon HD 6850 and the GeForce GTX 460 with 1 GB. During its presentations, AMD compared the Radeon HD 7770 GHz Edition against the GeForce GTX 550 Ti, but they are in different price segments. In the table below, we compare the main specifications of the video cards included in our review. As you can see, the Radeon HD 7770 GHz Edition works at 1 GHz, and hence its name. The prices listed below do not include rebates and are for the models with the clock and memory configurations listed below. Prices were researched at Newegg.com on the day we published this review, except for the Radeon HD 7770 GHz Edition, which is the price advertised by AMD.

Video Card	Core Clock	Shader Clock	Memory Clock (Effective)	Memory Interface	Memory Transfer Rate	Memory	Shaders	DirectX	Price
Radeon HD 7770	1 GHz	1 GHz	4.5 GHz	128-bit	72 GB/s	1 GB GDDR5	640	11.1	USD 160
Radeon HD 6850	775 MHz	775 MHz	4 GHz	256-bit	128 GB/s	1 GB GDDR5	960	11	USD 140 – 170
GeForce GTX 460	675 MHz	1,350 MHz	3.6 GHz	256-bit	115.2 GB/s	1 GB GDDR5	336	11	USD 140 – 150
GeForce GTX 550 Ti	900 MHz	1.8 GHz	4.1 GHz	192-bit	98.4 GB/s	1 GB GDDR5	192	11	USD 120 – 130

You can compare the specs of these video cards with other video cards by taking a look at our “AMD ATI Chips Comparison Table” and “NVIDIA Chips Comparison Table” tutorials.

Today, only the LGA2011 Core i7 processors (“Sandy Bridge-E”) have a PCI Express 3.0 controller. In our Radeon HD 7970 review, we discovered that, at this time, there is no difference between using a PCI Express 2.0 or a PCI Express 3.0 connection. Since the reviewed video card is a mainstream product, we decided to use a different testing platform, based on a Core i5-2500K processor.

Now let’s take a complete look at the AMD Radeon HD 7770 GHz Edition reference model.