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AMD Radeon HD 7770 pictured and benchmarked

by Parm Mann on 3 January 2012, 13:01

Tags: AMD (NYSE:AMD)

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The Radeon HD 7970 has stoked the fire that burns in every enthusiast's heart, but let's be honest, how many of us can afford to shell out over £400 on a new graphics card?

We're willing to bet it ain't many, so for those of you who are waiting for AMD's brand-spankin' Southern Islands architecture to trickle down to the mainstream, we've good news, as the wait may be shorter than anticipated.

According to the latest web-based rumour and speculation, the red team's mid-range Radeon HD 7770 will launch in February priced in the region of $150 (just under £100 excluding VAT).

The chop in price of course means a chop in specification, but the HD 7770 features a 28nm GPU that should still pack a punch. Codenamed 'Cape Verde,' the GPU is said to feature 896 stream processors, 56 texture units and 16 ROPs. The core is rumoured to be clocked at a staggering 1,000MHz, and it'll be attached to up to 2GB of GDDR5 memory via a 128-bit interface.

Could make for an interesting mid-range contender, and a forum user over at Chinese site ChipHell.com has purportedly put it through its paces.

 

There's no way of knowing if this is the final Radeon HD 7770 design, but the pictures look legitimate, and there's a close-up shot of the bare GPU that reveals how small (relatively speaking) the 28nm Cape Verde chip is. We can't imagine this one kicking out too much heat, and there's a good chance AMD partners will attempt passively-cooled derivatives.

Where can we expect the Radeon HD 7770 to slot in? Well, it's too early to say, and we await confirmation of an official specification, but the above card has been benchmarked - on a yet-to-be-released Intel Ivy Bridge system, no less - and scored 3,421 in the 3DMark 11 performance test. By our reckoning, that puts it comfortably ahead of a GeForce GTX 550 Ti, but just behind a Radeon HD 6850. Either way, the first few months of 2012 are going to be hugely interesting as far as PC graphics are concerned.



HEXUS Forums :: 32 Comments

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It still needs a PCI-E connector?? I would expect a card built on a 28NM process and with a smaller GPU than the HD6850 1GB to be bus powered. Hopefully,the PCI-E power connector is there for more stable power delivery and/or for OEMs to produced pre-overclocked models. OTH,it could be down to the 2GB of GDDR5 and hopefully a 1GB version which is bus powered will be released. The PCB also looks longer than what is needed too,so hopefully there will be shorter cards too.
hopefully it`ll overclock as well as the 7970 - currently at stock it matches the 6790
Looks like an engineering sample to me, so basically take everything said about it with a pinch of salt ;) Don't forget that even if it only draws 76W it'd still need a power connector!

Besides, just behind a 6850 is still a significant leap ahead of the 570 (which has been AMDs card in this price range for over 2 years now!) - the x7xx range tends to be the first non-bus-powered card - assuming AMD are following the usual radeon nomenclature. That could mean we'll be looking at a bus-powered 7670 with 5770 performance or better… which would do me very nicely ;)
a 6770 (5770) gets about 2800 in 3dm11; 3200 or so is pretty much a 5830 - nw price

it needs to be under £100

why?

£118 gets you a 6850 on scan and its faster - a 6790 (which it pretty much would replace) is also £100

edit:

SA is saying that the 76xx and lower will be rebrands - again
HalloweenJack
edit:

SA is saying that the 76xx and lower will be rebrands - again

I'd heard something similar, although I thought we were getting some lower-mid-range VLIW4 cards too :O_o1:

Something's up with the rumour mill somewhere…