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AMD Radeon HD 7770 - Seizing the Day with Cape Verde, the ASUS Way

By Wong Chung Wee - 15 Feb 2012

Conclusion - Better Existing Options Available

The Day Was Seized But To No Avail

The ASUS HD 7770 DirectCU TOP 1GB GDDR5 is an overclocked graphics card featuring the Cape Verde GPU running at 1120MHz and we expected it to be pitted against GeForce GTX 560 at the very least. After studying the initial benchmark figures, we had to take our expectations a down a notch and settle for GeForce GTX 550 Ti. While AMD did mention that the Radeon HD 7770 was meant to take on the GeForce GTX 550 Ti, we expected much better from an overclocked card. This means that a reference Radeon HD 7770 would actually fare slightly worse than this well equipped ASUS card we've reviewed and that's nothing to should about for a brand new GPU model.

From the AMD camp, while the company would like to call it the successor to the Radeon HD 5770, we would much rather compare the newcomer against presently available cards from the Radeon HD 6700 series. We took the liberty to pit the Radeon HD 7770 directly against an AMD Radeon HD 6790 by virtue of its current price point. To be honest, we never really quite liked the Radeon HD 6700 series because of their odd positioning and price as we would rather recommend someone on a budget to keep to a Radeon HD 6670 or spend a bit more for a much more powerful Radeon HD 6850 graphics card. As such, once we found out the capabilities of the new 7770 model, we were disappointed.

The estimated retailed price of ASUS HD 7770 is US$160 but the TOP edition we've reviewed will cost even more (pricing was unavailable at the time of review). Given its already modest performance scores, it does not quite stand out from the competition of older graphics cards from AMD and NVIDIA. As such, we weren't impressed by this newcomer.

Its performance can be described as anemic as given the fact that the card features an overclocked GPU with DirectCU cooling solution. The numbers it turned in did not impress us and we expressed earlier that it fared the worst for the Batman: Arkham City gaming benchmark; even with DX11 features turned off, it only managed generate frame rates of 38fps and wasn't any better than the compared predecessor.

With that said, it was not all bad for ASUS HD 7770 DirectCU TOP as it features the Cape Verde GPU which boasts of the same features as the other GPUs from Tahiti albeit they are implemented on a modest scale for Cape Verde. It has less GCN CUs than its Tahiti brethren and its memory bandwidth has been whittled down to 12GB/s due to its 128-bit memory bus channel. Its GPU is made from the same 28nm fabrication process as the Tahiti ones. In addition, ASUS HD 7770 features the same AMD proprietary technologies like AMD PowerTune, ZeroCore as well as Eyefinity; for easily setting up and configuring multiple monitors, and HD3D; for stereoscopic 3D.

This meant that the card ran very cool and consumed very low power as found out on the previous page, while offering features like HDMI 1.4a and DisplayPort 1.2 (in the form of two mini DisplayPorts) to easily setup several displays powered on just one card. This is one area where most of NVIDIA's solutions have faltered for over a year on something as trivial as multi-monitor setup beyond two displays.

We commend ASUS for an excellent Cape Verde GPU implementation with the ASUS HD 7770 DirectCU TOP graphics card, but the GPU's less than ideal performance had dashed most of our hopes of it making a difference in the graphics card market. Further to that, when considering that you'll have to pay even more for the TOP edition than the reference target SRP, we feel that the graphics card doesn't really offer an ideal proposition, not much of an advantage over existing graphics cards.

In the end, it seems like the Radeon HD7770 is unfortunately in same dilemma as its predecessor was without any clear territory to claim. While there's really nothing wrong with this series and this particular graphics card if you really want to go ahead to splurge on it, there are better existing options. And if you are one of the many upgraders looking for a good performance mainstream card, do wait a while until a definitive winner (from either AMD or NVIDIA) is unveiled in the next couple of months as there are many more GPUs SKUs to be launched.

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