Asus HD7770-DC-1GD5 (Radeon HD 7770) Graphic Card Review

The much awaited (or so) HD 7770 is here, is it a good card?

The Card

Plain looking card.

I’ve never liked heatsink cases that cover the PCI-E connector.

It comes with DirectCU cooling.

Dual mini-DisplayPort, HDMI and DVI.

More details at the Official Product page.

Test Setup

The computer setup used for this review.

Below is the GPU-Z for the card.

I’m comparing the HD 7770 against the GTX 460.

The Performance

Crysis

Graphic Detail : Maximum @ 1680×1050

Lost Planet 2

Graphic Detail : Maximum @ Full HD

(unfortunately my GTX460 was being a PITA for this game, so I’ll update the scores some other time)

Alien Vs Predator

Graphic Detail : Default setting @ Full HD

Furmark

Graphic Detail : Maximum @ Full HD

Unigine Heaven 2.0

Graphic Detail : Full HD, 4xAA, 16xAF, Tesselation at NORMAL.

Operating Temperature

Furmark was used for graphic card stressing.

Readings were taken when ambient temperature was around 25°C.

– Load, Furmark was run for 1 minute at Full HD with 4xAA.
– Stress, Furmark was run under the Stress Test mode for 5 minutes.

Conclusion

Coming in at RM 589, the ASUS HD 7770 is on a premium price of the HD 7770 range and it’s lovely to see that the GPU runs cool despite the stress on it.

That said, while this is a good product itself, it’s hard to justify the price (regardless of brand). The Radeon HD 6850 has been around for quite a while, it performs better than the HD 7770, consumes a bit more power and cost almost the same. Comparing to the nVidia side of the picture, the HD 7770 performs close to the GTX 460 (and old card) and consumes far less power.

So what we have with the Radeon HD 7770 is the familiar performance we’ve seen for a long while, and a rather high price but only with somewhat better power consumption. Seriously, gamers don’t care about power consumption. 🙂 In short – HD 7770 cards (including this one) are just not worth the price.

*Photos taken with the Canon Powershot G1X