XFX R7770 Black Edition 'S' Review

👤by Richard Weatherstone Comments 📅18-02-12
Specification
The AMD HD7700 series of graphics cards, codenamed Cape Verde are the third addition to the HD7000 series product line.



Prices for the R7770 start around the £115 mark so the current price tag of £144 for the XFX R7770 which is pre-overclocked and arrives complete with a customised cooler is none to bad because for the extra £30 you get a fully warranted, pre-overclocked, custom cooled example that not only looks better, but will perform better in terms of FPS and cooling.

Cape Verde

Based on the new 28nm manufacturing process, AMD have managed to cram in 1.5 billion transistors. The 640 stream processors afford 1.28 TFLOPS of computational power. The cores reference clockspeed is a blistering 1GHz and coupled with a gigabyte of GDDR5 clocked at 1125MHz gives a texture fillrate of 40 GT/s and a pixel fillrate of 16 GP/s.



The Cape Verde Core features 640 stream processors for the HD7770 and 512 for the HD7750, each has 512KB of L2 read-write cache but sadly we see the new core doesn't have the same 320-bit memory interface like we saw with the Tahiti but makes do with 128-bit. Regardless, the HD7770 produces up to 72 GB/s of bandwidth which is still impressive.

The new GCN architecture of the HD7770 comprises of 10 computational units with each one having 4 Vector Units. Drilling down further, each of the Vector units has 16 Stream processors which equates to an overall processor count of 640 - 4x16(10).

Clearly, the AMD HD7770 is aimed at the entry level end of the market but that said, these specifications should dictate the card being quite capable of playing at a resolution of 1920x1080 which is why we decided to test todays sample at this resolution.

It is worth noting too that the typical board power consumption is reported to be around 80W with an idle power consumption of less than 3W thanks to AMD ZeroCore power technology.



The XFX R7770 Black Edition goes beyond the clockspeed of the reference HD7770 in the chart above by some 120Mhz and the big overclock on the memory to 1300MHz (5200 effective) should equate to a significant bump in performance. Performance enhancements, usually translate to an increase in heat production but thankfully XFX have this are well and truly covered with the Double Dissipation GHOST cooler.

How this all translates to in-game performance we will have to wait and see but on paper at least, the XFX R7770 Black Edition looks to be an interesting proposition by the Pine Group company.

Let's take a look at the features of today's review sample...

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