Asus Radeon HD 7770 DirectCU TOP 1GB Graphics Card Review

Though the Radeon HD 7770 was released some time ago, its still a big deal for AMD as they are moving up in the market on their Radeon based products. In fact, they are even running a campaign based around their range, dubbed "Never Settle" which involves the addition of free games when purchasing certain Radeon SKUs. Due to this campaign, we thought that it would be a good opportunity to take a look at a particular edition of the HD 7770 from Asus; the DirectCU TOP edition. For those unaware as to what these cards are about, they in short are the cream of the crop and have had extensive quality control checks from the GPU core to the PCB and back again. They are so vigorous with this moniker of graphics cards that if one component isn't quite right, they will refuse the whole batch, now that's saying something about their quality control. In this review, we don't want to dwell to much on the 7770 from AMD, but instead, want to focus more on the uniqueness that the DirectCU TOP has to offer, and how it competes against other similar cards currently for sale in the market. In our usual fashion, we'll take a look at what the packaging and bundle have to offer before taking a closer look at the card itself. We will also be taking a look at the overclockability of the card to see how far it can be pushed past the overclock level that Asus provide out of the factory, as this already offers a large increase over a reference card, but obviously with us being enthusiasts, that's still not enough in our books. Lets start with the packaging and bundle, to see what the Radeon HD 7770 DirectCU TOP has to offer for your money. The box is what we expect from Asus with bright colouring and the main features laid out on the front. We see that it has a clock speed of 1120MHz and features the DirectCU cooler, giving 20% cooler results over stock. Flipping things over, we can see some more information on the cooler, DIGI+ VRM and GPU Tweak. Also printed here is a view of the rear I/O so you are aware as to what connections are available. Opening things up we find a setup guide, driver installation disc, CrossFire bridge and DVI to VGA adapter. Asus use a large single fan cooler which coveres the majority of the card. The styling is simple but effective with four red stripes across the middle of the card and some subtle Asus branding. We can also see a black PCB which is immediately welcomed by us at eTeknix. The large single fan includes 9 translucent fins and some more Asus branding in the center. Underneath we can see the large aluminium heatsink with connected heatpipes. Another view gives us a further look at the heatpipes steming from the top of the card. Also we find a single 6-pin PCI-Express power connector on the end of the card. A single CrossFire connector is available for those wanting to combine this card along with a second HD 7770 for improved performance at a later date. Finishing off with the rear I/O panel, we can see a single DisplayPort, one HDMI connector and two DVI ports, one being DVI-I and one being DVI-D. Being a 7000 series AMD card also means that this card has the ability and functionality for AMD Eyefinity for those wanting to run multiple displays. A standard Radeon HD 7770 comes with a clock speed of 1000MHz on the GPU core and 1125MHz on the memory. Asus have managed to increase past these levels with this card with a GPU clock of 1120MHz and a memory clock speed of 1125MHz. This is a fantastic speed increase, though we have seen cards from other brands with higher memory clocks, but we all know that the GPU clock makes more of a difference when wanting boosts in performance. The rest of the specifications are as expected with 1GB of GDDR5 memory on a 128-bit memory interface. The test the performance of this card, we use the latest drivers direct from the manufacturer and run each test three times to obtain a fair average set of results. Test System: Asus Rampage IV Extreme Intel Core i7 3960X 16GB Corsair Vengeance 1866MHz Antec Kuhler 920 Corsair HX1050W Kingston HyperX 240GB SSD Lian Li T60 Dell U3011 We would like to thank Asus, Corsair, Kingston, and Lian Li for supplying us with our test system components. Games used: Aliens Vs Predator Dirt Showdown Hitman: Absolution Metro 2033 Sleeping Dogs Hardware used: Plug-in electricity usage monitor Sound level meter Software used: 3DMark 11 HWMonitor Unigine Heaven Benchmark Windows 7 Professional 64-bit 3DMark 11 is the latest offering from Futuremark, taking full advantage of DirectX 11 by utilising tessellation features and volumetric lighting. It takes your graphics and CPU hardware to the edge to simulate the most extreme conditions whilst working as a stand point to compare results with other users online. Starting things off with 3DMark 11, we can straight away see some strong results from the card with the Performance score pushing ahead of the other Radeon HD 7770's. On Extreme it was beaten by the XFX BE OC model but still managed to give a good increase over a reference XT card. Heaven is regarded to be one of the most intensive Benchmarking utilities about at the moment along with the likes of 3DMark. It makes use of highly comprehensive tessellation technology, advanced SSAO (screen-space ambient occlusion) and a highly defined light algorithm to produce ever changing light conditions amongst other items. In Heaven, we saw some playable framerates across the two lower resolutions, and some strong numbers that were around 2-5FPS in front of the reference card from AMD. Aliens Vs Predator is a science fiction first-person shooter computer game that relies on DirectX 11 and high amounts of Tessellation in conjunction to give enhanced shadows and fantastic textures to the surrounds and characters within the game. In gaming performance, we see a similar story with playable results on 1920 and 1680 resolutions but a lower 20FPS at 2560x1600. In comparison to a reference card, we once again see a 2-3FPS difference. Dirt Showdown is a videogame from Codemasters and is part of the Colin McRae Rally games revolving around a tour of events to compete in allowing you to win money and prizes to spend on new cars and upgrades as well as unlocking new events and races. The game uses high resolution textures and AA settings to simulate dust particles, terrain and damage to the vehicles. Firing up Dirt Showdown the card once again offers an extra couple of FPS in comparison to the AMD 7770 XT but still falls under that magic 30FPS number that we hoped for at 2560x1600. Hitman: Absolution is an action-adventure stalth game developed by IO Interactive and published by Square Enix and is the fifth entry in the Hitman game series. The game runs on the Glacier 2 game engine and includes high levels of anti-aliaising, DirectX 11 technology, lighting effects and depth of field technology. Hitman showed that the higher resolution really couldn't cope to well with our settings and the card didn't offer much of a performance boost over a reference card. Metro 2033 is a first-person shooter game based in the Russian metro system. Metro 2033 is very similar to the much loved game STALKER as it is developed by the same programmers. The game utilises DirectX 11 and relies heavily on tessellation features and is considered to be one of the most graphics intense games on the market. In Metro 2033, we saw a slight performance boost by 1FPS, but this is hardly noticeable and only the lower resolution peaked over the 30FPS mark. Sleeping Dogs is a 2012 open world action-adventure game based around Wei Shen; a Chinese-American police officer going undercover. The game utilises DirectX 11 features as well as high quality intensive reflections and high-resolutions textures. In Sleeping Dogs, we see a 1-2FPS increase over a stock card, and once again only the lower resolutions pushing over that 30FPS barrier that we hope for. Noise is generally the bain of most consumers lives and in the hope of finding the quietest operation, we feel it's necessary to show you the audio level of components. We use the same components throughout this test and use a sound level meter to record the audio level of the system with a passive graphics card installed. Once we have the level recorded with the passive card, we continue to change the graphics card for the one that we are testing. Due to us having the audio level recorded before installation, it gives us a guide to work with and shows that anything over our initial level is an audio gain. Acoustics on this card were extremely good with not much difference between idle and load and seeing the card giving fantastic results in comparison to other cards. When looking at the reference card, we see a 6 degrees difference at idle and 10 degrees difference at load, making this one of the quietest cards we've ever tested. To test power consumption, we monitor the overall power of the system through a plug-in electricity usage monitor at an idle and load state. This allows us to show the fluctuation between how much power draw the graphics card takes at idle and at load. By monitoring the overall usage of the whole system, it gives an easy comparison if you wish to do the same yourself as opposed to buying very expensive individual testing equipment. Power consumption is another area where this card performs well, with a low idle wattage of 122 and a load wattage just keeping under 200 watts. It goes to show that these custom cards are able to offer a little bit more, but don't require mass amounts of extra power to do so. Measuring temperatures is all about being consitent, therefore we keep a steady eye on monitoring the ambient room temperature to make sure that it stays the same. While this is constantly being monitored, we measure the idle temperature of the card using HWMonitor over a 15 minute period. Once this has been recorded, we set FurMark into motion for 15 minutes and record the results again. With a quiet, low-powered card, we were keen to see how good the temperatures were and once again we saw some good results with an idle temperature of 31 degrees and a maximum load of 68. While the Sapphire FleX card did perform better in terms of temperatures, they are still a big improvement over a reference stock AMD card. The moniker that this card brands; TOP really does mean that it has Top Overclocking Performance, but for us, what it leaves the factory with just isn't enough and we wanted to see how much further it could be pushed and therefore found ourselves firing up our trusty tools of the trade to see how far we could push this card, while still keeping it stable. With a clock speed of 1120MHz on the GPU clock and memory speed of 1150MHz, we were hopeful that we could squeeze a little more from the GPU clock and a lot more from the memory. We already know that the 7770 cards are fantastic at overclocking, and with a DirectCU cooler bolted on this bad boy, we were expecting some great results and we weren't disappointed with us ending up at 1195MHz on the GPU clock (6.6% increase) and 1510MHz (6GHz Effective) on the memory clock (31.3% increase). These are some fantastic numbers and we have to hand it to Asus, they've made a fantastic card for overclocking. We then wanted to check stability and to see what kind of increase we had got from overclocking the card further so we fired up 3DMark 11 to see how the score had changed on the Extreme preset from its original score of 1201 points. As you can see, we had a bit of a chuckle with the score as it was quite "l33t" but is a nice increase from 1201 to 1337 giving us an 11% increase in performance overall in 3DMark 11. 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.