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
VCE & The Test
Although it’s not unheard of for a video card to launch without all of its features enabled in its drivers, it’s rare to see a video card go for more than a couple of weeks without support for a major feature. AMD’s Video Codec Engine (VCE) – their fixed function H.264 encoder – is still not enabled as of the 7700 series launch. For the 7900 series this wasn’t such a big deal as high-end cards are typically paired with high-end CPUs, but the fact that it’s not enabled for the 7700 series launch is a bit more unsettling. These are cards that are going to be paired with slower CPUs, where having a high speed H.264 encoder is going to be all the more important. This is particularly so for the 7750, given its obvious aspirations for HTPC usage.
AMD was supposed to provide an official statement on the matter for the 7700 launch, however as of press time they have yet to do so. At this point we can only speculate what the holdup is, but regardless it’s unfortunate for AMD.
Moving on, for the launch of the 7700 series AMD provided us with a new driver, which identifies itself as 8.932.2. This driver only works with Cape Verde, and while we’re unable to test it with other cards we’re told there are no performance differences between it and the 7900 series drivers AMD released last month.
| CPU: | Intel Core i7-3960X @ 4.3GHz |
| Motherboard: | EVGA X79 SLI |
| Chipset Drivers: | Intel 9.2.3.1022 |
| Power Supply: | Antec True Power Quattro 1200 |
| Hard Disk: | Samsung 470 (256GB) |
| Memory: | G.Skill Ripjaws DDR3-1867 4 x 4GB (8-10-9-26) |
| Case: | Thermaltake Spedo Advance |
| Video Cards: |
AMD Radeon HD 7970 AMD Radeon HD 7950 AMD Radeon HD 7770 AMD Radeon HD 7750 AMD Radeon HD 6870 AMD Radeon HD 6850 AMD Radeon HD 5770 AMD Radeon HD 5750 NVIDIA GeForce GTX 560 NVIDIA GeForce GTX 550 Ti NVIDIA GeForce GTX 460 1GB NVIDIA GeForce GTX 285 |
| Video Drivers: |
NVIDIA ForceWare 295.51 Beta AMD Catalyst Beta 8.921.2-120119a AMD Catalyst Beta 8.932.2 |
| OS: | Windows 7 Ultimate 64-bit |
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rdh - Wednesday, February 15, 2012 - link
Bingo. But your numbers look at if you were to want to buy today. You might have bought the 5750 or 5770 at a significantly lower cost during a sale in the past 2.5 years. So individual price comparisons may be different than today's prices.IN ADDITION: the 7770 and 7750 require about 3% less power and produce frame rates about 10% higher than their 57xx counterparts. This is after the 57xx have been out for nearly TWO AND HALF YEARS. I purchased both (the 5750 for one system at $65 and the 5770 for another at $99) about 6 months after introduction. Two years later, there is no compelling reason for me to upgrade. That means AMD is only going to be selling these to new desktop purchasers.... a quickly shrinking market. This cannot be good for AMD.
CeriseCogburn - Saturday, March 10, 2012 - link
Since fps is your only metric, itself being a murky and disturbed error filled easily biased mess based upon game set, driver cheating, resolutions, and in game settings chosen, the entire price/perf chart is EPIC FAIL.When your drivers crash, when your game doesn't work, when new games don't work for weeks and months, when dual card drivers are absent, when features like PhysX are no can do - NONE OF IT IS ACCOUNTED FOR....
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Obviously all amd has to do is follow the simpleton idiot fps/per dollar formula for all the stuck cursor gsod fanboys to bloviate and screech they saved 20 cents... then the amd forum masters casn continue to lock them out, lock user problem threads, and smart off that "it's works for them on their eyefinity setup theya re starig at right now"...
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When a crazed, worship filled, religious zealoutry claims the heavens have opened on the cheap and the devil competition has lost all, beware...
Oh.. wait... sorry talking to the wrong person...
Roland00Address - Wednesday, February 15, 2012 - link
I am curious how high these cards will go before they hit the powertune limits.Ryan Smith - Wednesday, February 15, 2012 - link
I'm still writing up an addendum, but here's what I have for the 7770.Ref 7770: 1125MHz core, 4.8GHz memory
XFX 7770: No meaningful overclock on top of XFX's factory overclock. Crashed at 1160MHz core
As for performance, basically look at the XFX card.
Roland00Address - Wednesday, February 15, 2012 - link
Personally I find that the more interesting cardRyan Smith - Wednesday, February 15, 2012 - link
We didn't do any overclocking tests on the 7750. It was necessary to quickly test it in order to be able to ship it to Ganesh for HTPC testing.DarkSynergyt - Wednesday, February 15, 2012 - link
Might be a stupid question but can the 7750 output audio over HDMI? I'm in the process of building an HTPC and this is the final piece to the build.evilspoons - Wednesday, February 15, 2012 - link
My 6570 can and I'm pretty sure they said in the review that it has all the same features as previous generations for video features.ganeshts - Wednesday, February 15, 2012 - link
Yes, it does. With full bitstreaming options too (even WMA Pro). 7.1 channel LPCM support is also there. No worries. (Of course, hot plugging [ say, moving from a direct monitor connection to an AV receiver input ] causes the audio output to act crazy, but that is the case with every card. Reboot fixes the issue)evilspoons - Wednesday, February 15, 2012 - link
This really drives home how obsolete my GTX 285 is. The 7770 has about equivalent performance and uses *130 watts* less.I need a new video card, but I want to see what Nvidia has for us next - I'm not a fanboy (in spite of all my gaming cards since the 3dfx Voodoo 3 being Nvidia), I'm just genuinely hoping for either some competition to drive prices down or something better to blow us away. Come on guys, get a move on already!