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 7770 GHz Edition
The second card launching today is the Radeon HD 7770 GHz Edition. Compared to the 7750 it’s based on a fully enabled Cape Verde GPU and features a higher core clock of 1GHz, versus 800MHz on the 7750.
Starting as always with the cooler, for the reference 7770 AMD has gone with something that is best described as half of a blower. The shroud is completely enclosed on the sides, but due to the position of the fan the card exhausts hot air out of both the front and the rear of the card, which is something that’s common for dual-GPU cards such as the 6990 but atypical for a midrange video card. Heat transfer is provided by a basic black aluminum heatsink, while the fan is embedded in the middle of the heatsink.
As for the card itself, it’s effectively an extended version of the 7750. Like the 7750 the card is equipped with 4 256MB 5GHz Hynix GDDR5 RAM chips, along with some additional VRM circuitry to handle the higher 100W power limit for this board. External power is provided by a single 6pin PCIe power socket, while at the top of the card there is a single CrossFire connector. This is actually down from 2 connectors on the 5700 series, which comes as no great surprise as virtually no one ever used tri-CF with the 5700 series in the first place. Overall the card is 8.25” long with no notable shroud overhang, making it the same length as the 5770’s PCB.
Meanwhile for display connectivity AMD is using the same configuration as we’ve seen on the 7900 series: 1 DL-DVI port, 1 HDMI port, and 2 miniDP ports. Unlike the 7900 series AMD’s not requiring their partners to include any adaptors, so buyers with 2 DVI monitors will almost always be on their own. The presence of 2 miniDP ports means that the 7770 has quite a bit of flexibility in driving various displays, however as with the 7900 series if you want to drive more than 4 displays you will need a MST hub, the release of which is still some time off.
As for partner cards, as with the 7750 all of AMD’s partners are doing their own thing. No one will be using AMD’s reference cooler, though PowerColor in particular will be using a cooler similar to it. Everyone else will be using their own double-wide coolers, most of which will be open air as we typically see in this market segment. Like the 7900 series AMD is relying on the 7770 having some degree of overclockability, so there will be a number of factory overclocked cards taking advantage of this.
Finally, I wanted to quickly touch on the naming of the 7770. The official name of the 7770 is the Radeon HD 7770 GHz Edition; with the last bit being AMD’s latest marketing push. Starting with the 7770, AMD is going to be branding every card with a reference clock at or above 1GHz as a “GHz Edition” card to capitalize on the fact that they’ve hit 1GHz. Thus in spite of what the name implies there won’t be a 7770 non-GHz Edition card, as it’s a tagline rather than a true suffix necessary to differentiate cards.
With that said, while hitting 1GHz on a GPU is a notable accomplishment for AMD and should not be ignored, it’s not going to be particularly important in the grand scheme of things. The embarrassingly parallel nature of rendering means that GPU performance isn’t nearly as tied to clockspeeds as CPU performance is, as you can always lay down more functional units to improve performance. Clockspeeds do need to go up over time due to the limited parallelization of the command processor, but otherwise GPU performance has never been heavily dependent on clockspeeds.
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kallogan - Wednesday, February 15, 2012 - link
HD 6850 is still the way to go.zepi - Wednesday, February 15, 2012 - link
So basically in couple of generations we've gone4870 > 5770/6770 > 7770
Chip size
260mm2 > 165mm2 > ~120mm2 chip.
Performance is about
100 > 100 > 120
Power consumption in gaming load according to Techpowerup (just graphics card):
150W - 108W - 83W
And soon we should have 1 inch thick laptops with these things inside. I'm not complaining.
silverblue - Wednesday, February 15, 2012 - link
Good point. One thing I think people forget is that smaller processing technologies will yield either better performance at the same power, or reduced consumption at the same performance... or a mix of the two. You could throw two cards in dual-GPU config for similar power to one you had two years back, and still not have to worry too much if CrossFire or SLi doesn't work properly (well, if you forget the microstuttering, of course).cactusdog - Wednesday, February 15, 2012 - link
WHy is the 6770 left out of benchmarks?? Isnt that odd considering the 7770 replaces the 6770? I really wish reviewers would be independant when reviewing cards, instead of following manufacturer guidelines.Markstar - Wednesday, February 15, 2012 - link
No, since the 6770 is EXACTLY the same card as the 5770 (just relabeled). So it makes sense to continue using the 5770 and remind AMD (and us) that we do not fall for their shenanigans (sadly, many do fall for it).gnorgel - Wednesday, February 15, 2012 - link
For your 6850. It should sell a lot better now. Maybe they really stopped producing it and need to get rid of stocks. But when it's sold out almost anyone should go for a gtx 560, 7% more expensive and 30% faster.The only reason to buy a 7770 now is if your powersupply can't support it and you would have to get a new one.
duploxxx - Wednesday, February 15, 2012 - link
by the time the 6850 is out of stock the 78xx series are launched which will knock out 560don't understand what evryone is complaining about, its faster then the 57xx-67xx series, les spower. sure it's not cheap but neither are the 57-67 @ launch. Combined with old gen available and NV products a bit to expensive but this is just starting price....
akbo - Wednesday, February 15, 2012 - link
Moore's law apparently doesn't apply to graphic cards. People expectations do. People expect that every two years gpus at the same price point have double transistors and thus be faster by so. Obviously perf does not scale like so since the 28 nm shrink only has a 50% improvement from 40 nm. However that would mean a 50% improvement is expected. Imperfect scaling would mean a 40% improvement.So people expect that a card which is 20% faster than a card from 2 years ago to be 1.2/1.4 the price at launch, or an ~ 85% of the 5770 launch price in this case. That would mean that the card should retail at around $130-140 or so for the 7750 and sub-$100 pricing, like $90 or so. I expect it to be that price too.
chizow - Wednesday, February 15, 2012 - link
Moore's Law does actually hold true for GPUs in the direct context of the original law as you stated, roughly doubled transistors every 2 years with a new process node. The performance has deviated however for some time now with imperfect scaling relative to transistors, but at least ~50% has been the benchmark for performance improvements over previous generations.Tahiti and the rest of Southern Islands itself isn't that much of a disappointment relative to Moore's Law, because it does offer 40-50% improvement over AMD's previous flagship GPU. The problem is, it only offers 15-25% improvement over the overall last-gen performance leader the GTX 580 but somewhat comically, AMD wants to price it in that light.
So we end up with this situation, the worst price performance metrics ever where a new GPU architecture and process node only offers 15-25% performance increase at the same price (actually 10% more in the 7970 case). This falls far short of the expectations of even low-end Moore's Law observer estimates that would expect to see at least +50% over the last-gen overall high-end in order to command that top pricing spot.
arjuna1 - Wednesday, February 15, 2012 - link
DX11.1?? With only one true DX11 game on the market, BF3, there is literally no incentive to upgrade to this generation of cards 7xxx/kepler.Unless nvidia comes out with something big, and I mean big as in out of this world, I'll just skip to the next gen, and if AMD insists in being an ass with pricing, I'll go Ngreen when the time comes.
Now, the worrying thing is that it's becoming evident, both parties are becoming too cynical with price fixing, when is that anti trust lawsuit coming?