Final Words & Conclusion
Final Words & Conclusion
AMD has been receiving a lot of positive attention from the media ever since they released the series 7000 cards, it will not be any different with the Radeon HD 7750 and 7770. That success can be found in two things, the first is the GCN architecture, which simply offers nice and decent performance over the last generation architecture. The second factor (and it might sound a bit strange) is NVIDIA, or better said, the lack of NVIDIA's presence in the market with new products. The series 7000 is something new and working well, and that's what you as a consumer likes to see.
So will the R7770 be as big of a success as the R5770 was? We doubt that very much, the Juniper GPU based R5770 was revolutionary at the time as it had 800 shader processors, as such entry level performance simply doubled up from what we had seen in the past, we had never seen that before. The R7770 (and R7750) will be merely a small speedbump in terms of comparative performance in-between the two cards.
The architecture is sound and solid though. Give the card the right graphics quality settings and it can work even at a 1920x1080 monitor resolution -- if you can live with just above 30 FPS framerates. For us that's too much of a compromise though, and we feel that the R7700 series is served best in a PC with a monitor resolution from 1280x1024 up-to roughly 1600x1200.
And honestly that's nothing to be ashamed about considering the price level we are at. Speaking of price levels, the final MSRP prices just arrived, the AMD Radeon HD 7770 will start at $159USD, while the AMD Radeon HD 7750 will be available from $109USD.
Now the 7770 board consumes roughly 80 Watts when gaming. In idle, roughly 10 Watts, and when your monitor shuts down it will throttle down even further towards 3 Watts. That's impressive stuff.
Heat won't be an issue either, in fact some passive models have already been announced, which makes this card interesting for HTPC usage as well.
The Radeon HD 7750 I'm less impressed with. It's good that it is a single slot solution, but due to that you can hear the card. Normally I'd recommend a product like this as an HTPC card, but please be on the lookout for a customized model then with a better, quieter cooler. Overall though, it packs enough punch to play a game or two up-to 1600x1200 in our opinion.
All in all, the Radeon 7750 and 7770 remain good entry level products. We had hoped to see a little more performance though, but we'll have to wait and see what all the board partners will do in terms of even higher (factory clocked) clock frequencies. If you need a little more bite, don't be afraid to overclock these cards. A 10% to 20% gain should be easily achieved.
So overall, the Series 7700 comes recommended, though it is not as revolutionary as the R5770 release was. But it will still offer good performance at a good price (once they settle and drop a little). If we focus at the Radeon HD 7770 primarily then the performance level is just under that of the R6850 but we prefer the R6850. And with a pricetag of 159 USD / 135 EUR it really is battling is with the GeForce GTX 460 though.
It is a card series designed for consumers on a tight budget, but we feel prices will need to come down as it is positioning itself in a very saturated segment.
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