facebook rss twitter

Review: MSI Radeon HD 7770 OC CrossFire examination

by Tarinder Sandhu on 22 February 2012, 08:12 3.0

Tags: AMD (NYSE:AMD), MSI

Quick Link: HEXUS.net/qabcsz

Add to My Vault: x

Power, temps, noise, and overclocking

Power

Moving on to metrics where the MSI card should score well, the benefits of a 28nm process, with respect to power consumption, are clear to see. Two of these overclocked puppies draw less power than any other single-GPU card in the line-up, save for the HD 7770 itself: nice. Do bear in mind that we had to use power-draw in Total War: Shogun 2 and not Crysis 2, as for the other cards, as two-GPU HD 7770 doesn't scale well in this title.

Temperatures

MSI's twin-fan cooler does an admirable job of keeping the GPU cool. 59°C is barely lukewarm by graphics-card standards, though adding a second pushes this up by 10 percent or so. A standard HD 7770's temps are 67°C, by the way.

Noise

The fan speed barely changes from idle to load for a single card, evidenced by the logs showing speed to rise from 39 percent of maximum to 41 percent after 10 minutes of gaming.

Two cards together, with a slot's width between them, combine to make rather more noise - perhaps the cooler spitting out heat around the surrounding areas does it no favours when another card is in close proximity. Two, then, certainly aren't quiet.