Asus Radeon HD 7770 DirectCU TOP 1GB Graphics Card Review

We tend to take a look at a lot of Asus motherboards, but never many graphics cards, so this was a welcomed product when it arrived with us. In fact we actually received two of these from AMD, and will be publishing our CrossFire results in the very near future, so keep an eye out for that one. For now though, we have to focus on what we saw today, and that is a single card in the top of the Asus product range, though not necessarily AMD’s. The Radeon HD 7770 will never offer blistering, lightning fast performance, and it was never released to market to do so, but instead was made to offer fantastic performance for its price, and that’s exactly what it does and with recent price cuts from AMD, it puts the whole 7000 range in a good place when compared to the green team Nvidia.

What Asus have done essentially is taken this fantastic value for money product and given it some steroids to offer more performance, not just on the graphical side, but in terms of cooling performance too, and I’d like to touch a bit on both aspects of the card, starting with the graphical performance. The card comes with a slightly higher clock speed compared to a reference card, but it’s a bit disheartening when the likes of XFX have managed to push the memory clock so much further, as this seems to be an area that a lot of manufacturers miss, and remember; the higher the number, the better it is right? It just shows from our overclock how much further we could push the memory, so we have to ask; why didn’t Asus do this for the consumer already? Either way, the increase in speed did see some improvements in framerates and scores, with some benchmarks offering substantial gains but for the most part, we saw negligible increases of around 2FPS which for the most part won’t be noticed in the real world.

The cooling performance was something that really did stand out, with some amazing low noise outputs and some temperatures that will see you cool and quiet no matter what you throw at it. DirectCU coolers from Asus are renowned as some of the best on the market, and what we saw today shows you exactly why that is, as it did the job it was set out to do and saw some of the lowest acoustics we’ve ever had pass through our offices.

In terms of overclocking, we were able to push this card quite a bit further in terms of the memory clock, and also managed to push the GPU clock higher by a reasonable margin, and as you can see from our overclocking results, we managed to see a nice improvement of 11% on the 3DMark 11 Extreme test, and coincidence saw us getting a “l33t” result at that.

It has to be said that I was expecting a “little” bit more from this card in terms of 3D performance in games and benchmarks, though it still manages to offer a bit more over a reference card, but with such a tight market and different brands competing, if you’re looking for the best possible performance, the Asus, Sapphire and XFX cards are all very much of a muchness, and only price will be the deciding factor unless you strive for the ultimate quiet machine, which is where you’ll find the Asus HD 7770 DirectCU TOP really shines, and that in our eyes is part of the performance.

The bottom line is that while graphical performance was on par with some of the other cards from competing brands, the acoustic value and the outright performance of the cooling solution warrants this card receiving our Extreme Performance award.