SAPPHIRE HD 7770

The question I always find myself asking is when it comes to my next graphics card purchase, what is more important? Is it processing core count or clock speed? The answer is often not clear with so many options on the market. Especially in the highly contested $150 – 200 price range. AMD has taken a side on the question for now as they are phasing out older cards with a new architecture that may have fewer stream processors, but much higher clock speeds. Today we are putting a card that follows this new trend and they call it the Sapphire HD 7770 GHz Edition OC. Let’s put it through its paces and see if this new approach to performance is the right one.

 Features and Specifications

The Sapphire HD 7770 GHz Edition OC is based on the 28 nanometer GCN Architecture with 10 Compute cores (640 Stream Processors), 40 Texture Units, 64 Z/Stencil ROP Units, and 16 Color ROP Units. As with all GHz Edition AMD HD 7770 graphics cards, it is designed for at least 1 GHz core speed and 1125 MHz (4500 GHz effective) GDDR5 memory across a 128-bit bus. The Sapphire HD 7770 GHz Edition OC is the single fastest card in this category with a core speed of 1.15 GHz (1150 MHz) and 1250 MHz (5000 MHz effective) speed for the 1 GB memory onboard.
The Sapphire GHz Edition OC has plenty of connectivity as well with 1 x Dual-Link DVI, 1 x HDMI (with 3D), and 2 x Mini-DisplayPort. The DVI port is capable of 2560 x 1600 at 60 Hz. The HDMI supports full 3D stereoscopic 7.1 high bit rate audio. These ports can be combined to support AMD Eyefinity for up to four monitors. The Sapphire HD 7770 itself also has support for CrossfireX with one additional video card.
The Sapphire HD 7770 brings all the weapons the AMD 7000 series of graphics cards brings to the table as well. It has support for OpenGL 4.2, Enhanced Quality Anti-Aliasing (EQAA),  16x angle independent anisotropic texture filtering, ZeroCore power management, supports OpenCL™ 1.2, DirectCompute 11, Microsoft C++ AMP, and built for PCI Express 3.0 interface.
All of this can be found for around $149.99 US at retail. In this range are cards in AMD’s own stable which include the fairly abundant HD 6850 and the nVIDIA equivalent, GTX 550 Ti editions.

What in The Box

The content of the box is what you should expect from a mid-range graphics card with a few bonuses that pander to folks that may not have the most up to date systems. This is why Sapphire includes a DVI to VGA adapter and a PCI 6-pin to molex 4-pin adapter, making it easier to use your older monitor or a slightly older power supply. In addition you will have your user manual, driver installation disk, product registration information, CrossfireX bridge, and Sapphire case badge.