Something we are not used to seeing on a graphics card are the warranty seals XFX apply to the screws holding the GPU bracket to the PCB ensuring that the seals will be broken by placing a screwdriver into the screw. Removing the cooler will therefore void the warranty on XFX cards so please bare this in mind should you wish to replace the thermal paste. It should be noted however that the need to do this is defunct simply because the paste used and the contact to the core, as we will see, is excellent as is and a manually application is completely unnecessary.



The Cooler used on the XFX R7770 Black Edition is near identical to that used in the flagship models save for being slightly shorter. The aluminium shroud covers an aluminium finned array, itself soldered to a copper baseplate. The aluminium fins are longitudinal so the majority of cool air passing over them will be exhausted towards the front and rear of the card rather than the sides. The copper baseplate has four rubber spacers to ensure the cooler sits stable on the core which in our example made perfect contact to the core.



Removing the cooler was very easy thanks to the card havinng just four spring loaded screws holding the cooler to the PCB. Unlike flagship models, the card layout is a little different in that the VRM is set furthest away from the PCIe power port. As suspected earlier in the review, the Cape Verde 7770 core is partially framed by four 256MB memory modules.



The XFX R7770 is 3 phase VRM design equipped to handle the 100W TDP. XFX tout their power design as Duratec which favours Solid (12) capacitors in favour of traditional electrolytic versions along with MOSFET drivers and a combination of iron coil and Ferrite core chokes.



The memory used on the XFX R7770 hails from HYNIX with a product code of H5GQ2H24MFA T2C which are specified to run at 5GHz (effective) but are clocked on the R7770 over spec at 5200MHz so it remains to be seen how much headroom is left with this component.



The core is measured at 123mm² which is most impressive when you consider the 1.5 billion transistors AMD have managed to cram into it. Unlike the reference version, XFX have added a surround to the core, presumably to offer more stability and protection due to the heavier cooler.

Let's now take a look at today's test setup...