AMD Radeon HD 7750 & Radeon HD 7770 GHz Edition Review: Evading The Price/Performance Curve
by Ryan Smith & Ganesh T S on February 15, 2012 12:01 AM EST- Posted in
- GPUs
- AMD
- HTPC
- GCN
- Radeon HD 7000
Meet the Radeon HD 7750
We’ll kick things off as always with a look at the cards themselves, starting with the Radeon HD 7750. As we alluded to before, this is the de-facto replacement for the Radeon HD 6670, and you only have to take one look at the card to understand why.
AMD’s reference design for the 7750 is virtually identical to the full-profile 6670 or the FirePro V4900, which should come as no surprise given that all of these cards are or were AMD’s top sub-75W cards in their respective markets. As a result, like those cards the reference 7750 is a full-profile card featuring a single-wide active cooler.
As the 7750 is AMD’s cheapest Southern Islands card, you won’t find much else on the card to speak of. As a sub-75W card it doesn’t need external power, and cementing its position as the replacement for the 6670 there isn’t a CrossFire connector on the card. For RAM the card uses 4 256MB Hynix GDDR5 RAM chips, which are rated for 5GHz. The card is 6.57” long overall, the same length as the 6670.
Meanwhile for display connectivity, AMD is once again using the same configuration as we’ve seen in their other full-profile mainstream cards. This means 1 DL-DVI port, 1 HDMI port, and interestingly enough 1 full size DisplayPort. The latter is particularly odd, as the rest of the Southern Islands lineup is exclusively miniDP and in the last year miniDP has become the de-facto port for source devices. AMD has told us that there’s no specific reason that they’re using a full size DisplayPort here, and we believe it’s largely being done out of maintaining consistency with previous products. With that said we’d rather see miniDP here – even if it’s just 1 port instead of 2 – so that it’s consistent with the rest of the 7000 series.
Finally, as is customary for a midrange product launch, everyone is doing semi-custom cards right off the bat. Everyone will be using AMD’s PCB for now, while none of the 7750 cards in the press materials sent to us will be using AMD’s cooler. Instead we’ll see a range of designs, from similar side-wide designs to the more common double-wide designs, and even a passively cooled design from Sapphire. Much like the 6670 the HTPC use case for the 7750 is rather obvious, so we suspect that we’ll see more passive and perhaps even some low-profile cards in the future.
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ArizonaSteve - Wednesday, February 15, 2012 - link
Time for the DOJ to start looking into the price fixing that's going on here.A5 - Wednesday, February 15, 2012 - link
Price fixing is explicit, purposeful collusion between 2+ manufacturers to set prices at an unnaturally high level. For an example, see the memory market in the early 2000s.That is not what is happening here.
mattgmann - Wednesday, February 15, 2012 - link
Both of these companies settled price fixing lawsuits in 2008 under similar circumstances. They've cheated before; don't be surprised if they're cheating again.mckirkus - Wednesday, February 15, 2012 - link
If Coke and Pepsi both start pricing cans of soda at $50 each, doesn't mean people will buy them. The 7770 is a $50 can of soda.CeriseCogburn - Wednesday, March 21, 2012 - link
Yeah sure is price fixing when the always victorious gtx460 is $110 bucks and beats the 7770 every time and there's a large stock available...Or the other, triple fan GTX580 at the egg for $359, and the other reduced way down from $500.
AMD is scalping we customers even now and has been since before this review.
chizow - Wednesday, February 15, 2012 - link
There's an easy solution to price fixing: Don't buy at their asking price, or buy the faster, last-gen for cheaper.Its not like GPUs go bad like produce or get consumed like oil. Just keep using whatever you have in your rig now, because chances are its just as fast at a cheaper price than what AMD is asking for these "new" next-gen parts.
Iketh - Thursday, February 16, 2012 - link
meh I'm not worried about it just yet, it's too early... I bet it's because of poor yields, which would make the pricing legitimate... remember it's a new arch on a new nodeif the situation is the same in a month or 2, i'll be among those complaining
akbo - Wednesday, February 15, 2012 - link
I guess AMD is gonna let go of the old 6850 quick, 'cause no one is gonna buy it with this prices. Perf/watt very good tho, although mem bandwith very dissapointing. DDR4 is not coming soon enough, let alone GDDR6. 128 bits are simply not enough and 256 bits is adding more power/complexity. Can't wait for the day when GDDR6 comes and hopefully doubles bandwith for lower power/efficient clock speed. Oh, and gpu companies, when that day comes, don't be stingy like you always are and end up giving us 64 bits instead.silverblue - Wednesday, February 15, 2012 - link
Bring back TBDR and you won't need stupidly wide memory buses. ;)Roland00Address - Wednesday, February 15, 2012 - link
This is figuring out the price per performance, how many dollars you have to spend to get each FPS. Using Anandtech's Crysis: Warhead: 1680x1050 Gamer Quality Everything, Enthusiast Shaders+4xAA (Lower is better since you get a better bang for your buck.) Prices are from Newegg, using the cheapest card out there, no MIR are factored in, price includes shipping. Notes the 7750 and 7770 are not on newegg yet, so I am using the MSRP with no shipping to figure out the FPS per dollar. The GTX460 is using an older anandtech test since it is no longer using the more recent benchFPS Per Dollar/Video Card/FPS/Price/Shipping/Total
$3.81 Radeon 5750 28.1 99.99 6.98 106.97
$3.23 Radeon 5770 32.5 104.99 0.00 104.99
$3.23 Radeon 6850 45.7 139.99 7.56 147.55
3.01 Radeon 6870 53.1 159.99 0.00 159.99
3.46 Radeon 7750 31.8 109.99 0.00 109.99
4.35 Radeon 7770 36.8 159.99 0.00 159.99
3.88 Geforce GTX550 TI 32.7 119.99 6.98 126.97
3.56 Geforce GTX460 1GB 41.4 139.99 7.56 147.55
3.65 Geforce GTX560 48.5 169.99 6.98 176.97
As you can see, the Radeon 7750 is actually a very good card for its price. It beats the old Radeon 5770 series, and all the Geforce only losing to the Radeon 6800 series in the terms of value. Don't forget though the Radeon 7750 can be single slot, doesn't need a 6 pin, and generates less noise and heat.
The 7770 on the other hand is the most expensive card in the terms of value. Notice that Geforce cards have a higher dollar per fps (they have less value), for the Radeon card to succeed it only has to compete with Geforce since Radeon still makes money if you buy one of the other Radeon cards. If the 7770 was priced at 131.01 it would have identical value as the gtx460 1gb, and 142.78 if the card was priced against the value of the GTX550 TI.
I wouldn't be surprised that the Radeon 7770 will drop to the 139.99 or 149.99 price range once all the older 5700 series and 6800 series leave the channel. I do not think we are going to see much cheaper 7750s though since it is a recycled part and its price per performance is very good already. OEMs are going to be eating up the 7750s like candy.