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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chizow - Sunday, February 19, 2012 - link
Those who do not learn from history are doomed to repeat it.There's a reason we look at the past, because chances are, what's already in your rig performs the same or better than what AMD is trying to sell you at the same or higher price than what you paid "in the past".
Everyone needs to set the bar for themselves in terms of what they are willing to pay for an "upgrade", and given there is negative scaling with these parts, its pretty obvious they fail on all fronts. But hey, even you acknowledge this.
Galidou - Tuesday, February 21, 2012 - link
Those with a choosen side should not try to explain whatever the history tells us because they have a biased opinion. They can't see both side of the medal as objectively possible as someone with an impartial view and form the beginning you've proven to be on nvidia's side.End of the discussion, you can try to explain history but it's YOUR perception. I never said history wasn't worthy of anything the thing is you always are on the same side which means it's worthless from the very beginning.
Galidou - Tuesday, February 21, 2012 - link
I do not think it's a TOTAL fail, the 7970 and 7950 isn'T very well priced, but it's not a fail like those. From your point of view a fail is from historical pricing. From my point of view and ALWAYS was like that, it's from a performance/price standpoint and I won't change because you tell me we should look at everything things from the past. Sure we can learn from it.There was once a man that beleived the earth was round. But the historians and everyone else beleive it was flat so they killed him. No need to put names in there... History used as an argument makes that sometimes.... You've got to renew your point of view else, you can't see further from what you know.
AMD is trying to sell you at the same or higher price than what you paid "in the past".
Like we said before, nothing new here, it's always the same with x2 parts from last gen for years now... And it's only an example from many others of rebranding older designs selling at higher price point which AMD and Nvidia are both strong at.
Galidou - Sunday, February 19, 2012 - link
The price is a failure from my perception, 7770 and 7750 is a big fail..... Unlike 7950 and 7970 non-attractive price/performance but still a little justified by it's performance compared to parts that are out NOW and not compared to freaking history of pricing or future video cards...People out there will buy the 7770 and they'll be totally satisfied for as long as they'll own the thing. If you spent 4 hours on the internet looking at video card prices and benchmarks and realize you're way better off with a 6850 you might find it a bargain. But for others, if you tell them what you did to get to that conclusion, they'll maybe end up being happy with their choice without searching because they had 4 hours of playtime outside on a sunny day and that's worth it, while you're on the computer looking to spend your money on the best you can find.
So in the end, whatever we might say, perception is the key in life, we can take a whole day speaking about that and in the end, everyone will be right, because each of us create it's reality by thinking and seeing it the way THEY want... You want to live in the past and the future analyzing everything, you'll end up loosing the present which is the only thing that exists...
chizow - Sunday, February 19, 2012 - link
Yes Rarson, its proof stupid people have low standards and will buy anything. How's your 7700 treating you?Plenty in stock actually: http://www.newegg.com/Product/ProductList.aspx?Sub...