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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Hellbinder - Thursday, February 16, 2012 - link
sorry for the type the 6000 list should have started with 6900Belard - Thursday, February 16, 2012 - link
This modern new 7750 at $110 performs about the same as a 4 year old 4850... which was selling for $100 about 3 years ago. The 4800 series was more expensive to produce and drink more power.The names don't mean much anymore, they were stupid to change the stack names which were fine from the 3000~5000 series.
delirious_nomad - Thursday, February 16, 2012 - link
there are reviews out there and 7770 X-Fired smoke a single 580 and for $300 some odd dollars...I have been out of PC gaming for along time and these are going to be my cards of choice.
reasons why... I don't care what the Jones do...
I play at 1080p on an adequate LCD TV... and I don't need graphics maxed to the gills...
I have older games Half Life, Jedi Knight, Knights of the Old Republic, Diablo, Morrowind, etc etc that I still want to play and the power down features and low power usage are great boons for me.
from the X-Fire reviews I've seen so far they scale at about 2x so just double the numbers and they smoke a single 580 while using less power and running nice and quiet...
also it gives me a year or so before I build my second system and who knows what will be out then. then this gets handed down to my son and off we go. and it should be plenty fast enough for Minecraft
the only card that comes really close for me is the 560 Ti 448 Core... and one of them is more expensive and doesn't beat a 580...
here is link to techpowerups' X-Fire review... http://www.techpowerup.com/reviews/HIS/HD_7750_777...
KineticHummus - Thursday, February 16, 2012 - link
"offers performance close to NVIDIA's GeForce GTX 570."That is straight from the techpowerup link you gave, on the conclusion page. Close to gtx 570 isnt smoking the 580 which is what you stated cf 7770s will do...
CeriseCogburn - Wednesday, March 21, 2012 - link
LOL - man ... thanks.Anyway there's a triple fan GTX 580 on egg for $359.
http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N8...
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I said it to you so I won't get attacked but maybe the gentleman would like to reconsider in light of our helpful posts.
papapapapapapapababy - Thursday, February 16, 2012 - link
this is all nice but sorry, I got burned waaaaaay to many times by AMD BS to even care! having to wait for months for proper support, faulty drivers and mind bogglingly piss poor performance per dollar in the latest games = never again going to buy or recommend any sort of AMD graphic solution. Im going to wait for the next gen consoles to launch, and then im going to get the absolutley cheapest and most efficient nvidia solution that offers me twice the performance of whatever m$, sony chooses to put inside their lil crappy casual boxes. Just like i Always DO, but his time AMD is out of the peculation for good! se ya.BoFox - Friday, February 17, 2012 - link
The only source of this is a slideshow from AMD regarding the launch of Barts GPUs.And then AMD launched Bulldozer with a slideshow saying that it has 2B trannies. A few months after launch, AMD admitted that it was an error, saying that it has only 1.2B trannies.
I've done such an extensive performance analysis to conclude that all Barts-based GPUs (6870, 6850, and 6790) are VLIW4-based just like its Cayman cousins.
GCN appears to be around 10% more efficient than VLIW4 for games overall, but it's very hard to say exactly how much. If a 78xx card that comes out next month has very similar specs to a VLIW4-based card (heck, or a VLIW5-based one), it'd be much easier to say. Still researching on this...
CeriseCogburn - Wednesday, March 21, 2012 - link
Man it's just amazing..." And then AMD launched Bulldozer with a slideshow saying that it has 2B trannies. A few months after launch, AMD admitted that it was an error, saying that it has only 1.2B trannies. "
I see that now...
" Update: AMD originally told us Bulldozer was a 2B transistor chip. It has since told us that the 8C Bulldozer is actually 1.2B transistors. The die size is still accurate at 315mm2. "
http://www.anandtech.com/show/4955/the-bulldozer-r...
Ok, there's just no way this core transistor miscount is a mistake. The level of incompetence requried for that to be a mistake and not a PR plot is staggering.
For that reason BoFox I don't doubt what you are saying about Barts 68xx's and 6790...
I'd sure love to see that exposed far and wide as well if true. It's just amazing to me, a staggering "error" on the most basic bulldozer spec... and we're supposed to just pretend it never happened and no explanation is ever given.
Yes there's a chance you are correct Bofox on your calculations, certainly cannot put it past amd given the track record.
maree - Friday, February 17, 2012 - link
From the consumer's point of view, the 7750 is the best card which doesn't require external power connector and hence can fit in with standard case and SMPS. The 7770 makes sense for those who crossfire, esp with long idle and compares favourably against the 6950/6970, esp for somebody who plans to buy only 1 7770 now and another one later when a better deal is availableFrom AMD's point of view, the 7750 seems to be targeted at the 80% of the Market who buy Intel PC, but are envious of the graphics capabilities of the puny Llano and even tinier Brazos. The 7770 seems to be targeted at the same folks for whom the BD was targeted. If somebody was prepared to buy a product(BD/7770) which is priced closer to competition(Core-i5/Gtx560) but gets beaten in all benchmarks and is priced more than old generation(PhenomII/6850) but still loses to it in many benchmarks. In short the 7770 is a Bulldozeresque disaster.
The situation would have been much better, if they had marketed these cards as 7670 and 7750, because that is were they belong based on die/transistor size and performance. Definitely a slip-up from AMD graphics Marketing dept.
Galidou - Sunday, February 19, 2012 - link
LoL rarson, let's not get into that kind of argument with chizow, you'll end up in WW2 history of tanks pricing failure due to the fact they were not double the raw power of last gen tanks from x company vs y company... history, history, history...Be careful with Chizow's arguments, he lives in the past, nothing new to reading his comments, it's already in the books and ready for anyone that reads it to perceive it the way they want(different from an ATI or Nvidia fanboy point of view)... :P