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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Oxford Guy - Wednesday, February 15, 2012 - link
What I'd like to know is why the 7950 is shown in the Idle temp charts and then vanishes from the Load temp charts.Oxford Guy - Wednesday, February 15, 2012 - link
Sorry.. Power consumption charts.I'd like to see the 7950/7970 load power consumption. The idle consumption is less interesting and that's where they're shown.
dananski - Wednesday, February 15, 2012 - link
Me too, the 6850 was worse than the 5850, so I'd expected it to be easily beaten by this generation's 770. Then again, the 6770 was just a 5770, so I suppose I should've learned that the mid-range is barely moving.designerfx - Thursday, February 16, 2012 - link
if you think about the fact of it's price today then it will probably be down substantially in a month - at which point it'd be quite competitive.ce12373 - Wednesday, February 15, 2012 - link
Hmmm. This AMD story sounds like a lot of other AMD stories (cough*cough "BULLDOZER"). Maybe no one has piledriven the point home to AMD yet. Oh well.medi01 - Wednesday, February 15, 2012 - link
Right, and it's a long time that nVidiai stopped producing overpriced "you can fry pancackes with these" GPUs and even hold performance crown? Oh, it's still producing them and AMD still hold performance crown? What a pity.Oh, but AMD went nVidia route with "confuse consumer more" naming scheme? How shameless, do they pay royalties for this to nVidia, the inventor of this rubbish?
aguilpa1 - Wednesday, February 15, 2012 - link
AMD has been doing the name bait and switch just as long as Nvidia but since your such a fan boy apparently you haven't noticed. It is obvious from your overheated GPU remarks that you are stuck on some ancient review of a past Nvidia product. And again, AMD has done the same, also in the past, 2900XT anyone?CeriseCogburn - Wednesday, March 21, 2012 - link
The GTX 590 still holds the single card crown.The very strange situation that has occurred is amd holding the single core card crown with 7970, finally passing the 580 after a year or closer to two and I don't remember how long.
This single core crown is gone already gone with the GTX680 benches leaked a few days early.
So amd finally did hold a crown for once in a very long time, for a very short time, 2.5 months or so....with most of that time in very weak or absent stock on retail shelves.
Spunjji - Thursday, June 21, 2012 - link
BLAH BLAH BLAH BLAH BLAHReticence - Monday, June 24, 2013 - link
You realize you're kinda the laughing stock of anandtech right? You wait with baited breath for every post remotely including AMD somewhere in the article to give you the opportunity to suck off nvidia and intel. I literally think you might need psychiatric help with that raging superiority complex, then again I've always thought there should be specially designed concentration camps for people like you who never grew out of acting like a blow-hard highschool kid.Oh well, down to business.
Two 7970's (And I mean two 7970's, NOT a 7990) perform better than one Titan, EVERY benchmark has shown it, you can not deny this. And I already know what you're doing to say "BUT THAT'S 2 CARDS VS. 1, NOT FAIR ;[" But see, this is the main point that proves you're a major fucking moron. That.does.not.matter.at.all.
The the Titan is 1000$.
Two 7970's are 800$.
And while yes, it's impressive that a single card can hold it's own against two, it doesn't matter, who is going to spend 200$ more for LESS performance? I'm sure you'll also say "you're just an AMD fanboy." Wrong, I just don't like to waste my money. And I really, really, don't like you.
Nuff said.
Oh and by the way, read it and weep, pussy.
http://www.semiaccurate.com/forums/showpost.php?p=...″