MSI Radeon HD 7770 OC edition review - Introduction

AMD released new GPU's under codename Cape Verde, and the graphics cards deriving from that GPU are the Radeon HD 7750 and 7770 One GHz edition. This is not a refresh it really is a completely new GPU based of the same technology that powers the R7900 series, the GCN architecture.

And that's interesting, as with less shader processors AMD will make this product a notch faster. They benefit from the GCN architecture but also have a trump card at hand, as this is the first ever reference card that is clocked at 1 GHz - hence AMD will give all these cards a 'GHz edition' extension. See, the 28nm node allows them to place a good 1.5 billion transistors onto the GPU 123 mm2 die, and that should make the card a good 25% faster opposed to the popular R5770.

AMD  has been focusing on three primary features and key selling points ever since the series 5000 products have been released. First off, the new graphics adapters are of course DirectX 11 ready. With Windows 7 and Vista being DX11 ready all we need are some games to take advantage of DirectCompute, multi-threading, Hardware Tessellation and new shader 5.0 extensions.

Another big feature of the product that you already learned about is of course Eyefinity, the ability to connect many monitors (depending on AIC/AIB choices in outputs) to your videocard and use it in a desktop environment, or to create an incredibly wide monitor resolution to play games in. The third big and prominent feature is of course performance for money.

MSI joins in on the Radeon HD 7770 release with their own custom model. They use their own custom 4-layer PCB and equipped it with a dual slot - dual fan cooler. The end result is the R7770 2PMD1GD5, we test the OC edition model which is clocked merely a shy 20 MHz higher then reference, still it's 1020 MHz on a graphics core. We like that.

Over the next few pages we'll walk through three standard reference technology and then place our focus on the  R7770 2PMD1GD5 OC. But not before you have had a peek alright. Next page please.