The HD6770 is a rebranding of the same core placed on the HD5770, the Juniper XT. This isn't the first time rebranding of GPU cores as manufacturers look to lengthen a GPU's lifespan. Both AMD and NVIDIA are equally guilty of this procedure, especially with lower end GPU's.
The Juniper core architecture was originally launched October 13th 2009 with the much praised Radeon HD5770. The HD5770 is widely regarded as the workhorse of AMD so it is clear why they are looking to extend the cores lifespan. It is manufactured down to 40nm and utilises 1.04 billion transistors and was originally perceived as a mid-range offering from AMD, capable of delivering DirectX 11 gaming.
The Juniper XT is a trimmed down version of the then flagship HD5870's Cypress core affording 800 stream processors, 40 texture units, 16 ROPs and a 128bit memory bus. This trimming of the Juniper cores yield meant that AMD were able to compete in the mid-range market without sacrificing too much grunt. Many people took advantage of the HD5770's cost and instead of opting for the pricier HD5870, they crossfired the two lesser cards with money saved. Thus the popularity of the HD5770 was born.
As you can see from the specifications above, the HD5770 and HD6770 are identical save for the 50MHz increase in clockspeed. This is no bad thing of course as the HD5770 was a phenomenal card by offering great value for money but I do worry as to how it will compare, especially at higher resolutions to our previous combatants. Of course, the HD6770 was never meant to be a graphics card capable of HD gaming at the highest resolutions despite it being able to support a 2560x1600 resolution so I will be looking at a popular mid-range resolution of 1920x1200 in this review.
Product Specification
Graphics Engine: AMD Radeon HD 6770
Bus Standard: PCI Express 2.1
Video Memory: GDDR5 1GB
Engine Clock: 850 MHz
Memory Clock: 4000 MHz ( 1000 MHz GDDR5 )
RAMDAC: 400 MHz
Memory Interface: 128-bit
D-Sub Max Resolution : 2048x1536
DVI Max Resolution : 2560x1600
D-Sub Output: Yes x 1
DVI Output: Yes x 1 , Yes x 1 (via HDMI to DVI adaptor x 1)
HDMI Output: Yes x 1
HDCP Support : Yes
Dimensions: 11.42 " x 6.69 " x 1.97 " Inch
One point worthy of note is that this card will take up 2.5 slots thanks to the huge cooler. With an expected price point of around £100 it's edging into GTX560 territory so it will be interesting to see how the two compare. Before we arrive at the testing of the HD6770, let's first take a look at what features the ASUS card has to offer...
