Gigabyte Radeon HD 7770 OC 1GB Graphics Card Review

So as we know, AMD have released a flood of cards lately, and their is a huge selection in terms of what’s on offer, including the 7750, 7770, 7850, 7870, 7950, 7970 and maybe even soon; the 7990 dual GPU card. With that aside, the consumer has a clear spectrum of cards to choose from and this allows the user to be a bit more picky in terms of what they go for.

This is down to the AMD partners, as they will all be battling it out to compete with each other and this could begin a nice price war with custom designed cards. Gigabyte have added their little bit into the mix by coming up with the Radeon 7770 OC edition that we looked at today, but sadly the OC element of it doesn’t seem to mean jack.

The overclock on this card may sound nice on paper, but it didn’t seem to offer up anything more than a reference card, and in some tests, gave worse results. While this seemed odd to us, we continued to run our tests three times to make sure that consistency was there, and the results kept coming in worse across most tests. The same drivers and components used were the same for both cards too, but it seems that the 7770 is already at its optimum performance and any increase can actually lead to worse results.

Now the area that this card does shine is all down to the cooler. Firstly, the card has a nice looking cooler with a large fan which will be welcomed by most consumers. It also doesn’t require mass amounts more power with only a 13 Watt increase over the reference card at load, which is bearable if you get better cooling results, and that is where this card really shines.

Noise wise, it’s not a fantastically large difference, but where this cooler really shows its merits is the temperatures, with a clear drop over the reference XT card. Almost 20 degrees difference can be seen between the reference card and this leading us to one area that is the clincher, and that’s the price. If this card is a lot more expensive than others, we can’t justify spending that extra money, just for a better cooler, though if the price is reasonable, then the performance issue can certainly be overlooked.

At around the £115 mark, it does redeem itself slightly, but upon looking around, it does seem that no major reputable retailers are stocking it currently, but this could all change in the very near future, but for now, I can’t really advise that this card is a bang for buck card, and certainly doesn’t warrant any form of performance rating.

We like Gigabyte products, and are always happy to give credit, where credit is due, but this card just doesn’t offer what we’ve seen from the likes of Sapphire and their 7770 OC edition card, that gave a distinct performance increase over the reference card. The Gigabyte 7770 OC from face value, only seems to have a better cooler, and that in our opinion, just isn’t enough.