facebook rss twitter

Review: PowerColor Radeon HD 7770 and AMD Radeon HD 7750

by Tarinder Sandhu on 15 February 2012, 05:00 2.5

Tags: PowerColor (6150.TWO), AMD (NYSE:AMD)

Quick Link: HEXUS.net/qabcnb

Add to My Vault: x

HEXUS bang4buck and bang4watt

Putting all the numbers into perspective, let's take a closer look at overall performance and value for money.

In a rough-and-ready assessment of the cards' bang for buck, we've aggregated the frame-rates for all our gaming benchmarks, normalised them1 and taken account of today's pricing.

But there are more provisos than we'd care to shake a stick at. We could have chosen different games, the cards' prices could have been derived from other sources, and pricing tends to fluctuate daily, especially for new-release GPUs such as the Radeon HD 7770/50.

Consequently, the tables below highlight a metric that should only be used as a yardstick for evaluating comparative performance with price factored in.

Value analysis at 1,280x720

Graphics card Aggregate FPS Normalised FPS1 Current price Bang4buck Power consumption Bang4watt2
  Sapphire HD 6870 (1,024MB) 463.10 400.15 £130 3.08 150 2.67
  Sapphire HD 6850 (1,024MB) 390.00 348.00 £110 3.16 128 2.74
  Sapphire HD 6790 (1,024MB) 346.00 311.80 £100 3.12 140 2.23
  PowerColor HD 7770 (1,024MB) 365.30 332.65 £125 2.66 117 2.84
  AMD HD 7750 (1,024MB) 291.00 250.50 £90 2.78 89 2.81
  HIS HD 6770 (1,024MB) 306.00 273.00 £80 3.41 126 1.29
  Gigabyte GTX 550 Ti OC (1,024MB) 325.70 295.85 £100 2.96 146 2.03
  ASUS GTX 560 (1,024MB) 450.20 401.70 £130 3.09 181 2.22

Value analysis at 1,920x1,080

Graphics card Aggregate FPS Normalised FPS1 Current price Bang4buck Power consumption Bang4watt2
  Sapphire HD 6870 (1,024MB) 275.70 233.55 £130 1.80 150 1.56
  Sapphire HD 6850 (1,024MB) 229.30 163.95 £110 1.49 128 1.29
  Sapphire HD 6790 (1,024MB) 194.40 111.60 £100 1.12 140 0.80
  PowerColor HD 7770 (1,024MB) 208.20 132.30 £125 1.06 117 1.13
  AMD HD 7750 (1,024MB) 162.20 63.30 £90 0.70 89 0.71
  HIS HD 6770 (1,024MB)) 176.10 88.35 £80 1.10 126 0.70
  Gigabyte GTX 550 Ti OC (1,024MB) 181.50 92.25 £100 0.92 146 0.63
  ASUS GTX 560 (1,024MB) 255.80 203.70 £130 1.57 181 1.13

1 the normalisation refers to taking playable frame rate into account. Should a card benchmark at over 60 frames per second in any one game, the extra fps count as half. Similarly, should a card benchmark lower, say at 40fps, we deduct half the difference from its average frame rate and the desired 60fps, giving it a HEXUS.bang4buck score of 30 marks. The minimum allowable frame rate is 20fps but that scores zero.

2 the HEXUS.bang4watt score is a crude measurement of how much normalised performance the GPU provides when evaluated against system-wide power-draw that's shown in the table: the former is divided by the latter. We're using the peak power-draw numbers obtained by running real-world Total War: Shogun 2.

Analysis

We've ordered the bang4buck graph with 1080p performance in mind; these £80-£130 GPUs should make a good fist of gaming at that resolution with medium/high image-quality settings. Penalising cards that can't manage 60fps at this setting, it's clear that the prices are holding back the two Cape Verde GPUs in this metric.