AMD Radeon HD 7770 and 7750 Video Card Reviews

XFX Radeon HD 7770 Black Edition

XFX was kind enough to send us over a retail card prior to the Radeon HD 7770 NDA lift, so we’ll also be looking at their card today. The card that XFX sent over is the Radeon HD 7770 Black Super Overclocked Edition featuring Double Dissipation! This graphics card has the longest product name of any that we have ever seen before!

XFX Radeon HD 7770 Series Video Cards:

XFX offers five AMD Radeon HD 7770 cards and the card that we were sent just happens to be the flagship model.

• Core Edition (FX-777A-ZNF4 & FX-777A-ZNFC) – 1000MHz Core Clock
• Double Dissipation Edition (FX-777A-ZDF4 & FX-777A-ZDFC) – 1000MHz Core Clock
• Black Edition (FX-777A-ZNB4 & FX-777A-ZNBC) – 1095MHz Core Cock
• Back Edition Double Dissipation (FX-777A-ZDB4 & FX-777A-ZDBC) – 1095MHz Core Clock
• Black Super Overclocked Edition w/ Double Dissipation (FX-777A-ZDSC) – 1120MHz Core Clock

The XFX R7770 Black Super Overclocked Edition featuring Double Dissipation will cost $179 or $20 more than the standard clocked cards. Asking for $20 more than the reference design isn’t too bad considering you get a better cooler and a much higher memory and core clock.

Inside the colorful outside box we found a smaller box.

Inside the inner box you’ll find a ton of fliers for other XFX
products, a quick install guide, the driver disc and, of course, the
famous XFX ‘do not disturb’ door hanger that has been included for
years. Under the paper work you’ll find the card itself, the CrossFireX
bridge interconnect, HDMI to DVI cable, DVI to VGA adapter, and a very large metal case
badge that looks pretty cool.

The XFX Radeon HD 7770 Black Super Overclocked Edition featuring Double Dissipation is a factory overclocked card that we are looking at today and has an 1120MHz core clock and a memory clock of 1300MHz (5200MHz effective). This is a 12% overclock on the core clock, so we should see a nice performance bump in the benchmarks with this video card.

Turning the XFX Radeon HD 7770 over we don’t find too many interesting things as the card doesn’t have a back plate or any of the GDDR5 memory chips on the back of the PCB. The AMD Radeon HD 7770 reference design used a small GPU heatsink support on the back of the card, but XFX is not using it. The measurements are identical to the AMD reference design.

XFX is using PCB model number is 109-C44157-00P, which is a newer revision of the AMD reference design.

We noticed that the GPU cooler screws have stickers on them and if
you remove them or break the seal to get to the screws it will terminate
the two year warranty that XFX places on all Radeon HD 7000 series cards.

The XFX Radeon HD 7770 has a pair of mini-DisplayPort 1.2
connectors, a full size HDMI 1.4a, and a dual-link DVI-I when it comes to video outputs just like the reference design. The only difference here is that XFX placed
their logo in the exhaust fan as you can see in the image above.

Since the XFX Radeon HD 7770 uses the AMD reference PCB the main differentiating factor is the custom GPU cooler that they are using on the card. The GPU cooler design has two fans with Ghost Thermal Technology for improved cooling performance.

The XFX R770 has a single 6-pin PCIe power connector located along at the end of the PCB that need to be hooked up just like the reference design as it uses the same PCB.

Looking across the top of the card you can see the copper base plate on the GPU cooler and a large set of aluminum cooling fins that help keep it cool. The PCB have some sag to it, so a PCB stiffening solution might not have been a bad idea here as this is what you’ll see when it is installed and you are looking at the card.