Sapphire Radeon HD 7770 FleX GHz Edition 1GB Graphics Card Review

Straight out of this box, we have a clock speed of 1000MHz due to the GHz branding, which is a nice ample amount of power, but us being us are keen to see how things can be pushed. What we have found recently however with both AMD and Nvidia cards is that these custom cards from brands such as Sapphire are already at peak performance and overclocking can be quite limited to say the least.

We will as usual stick to the same way of overclocking as we usually do which involves using tried and tested software that is used widely within the industry. These pieces of software include MSI Afterburner,Furmark, GPU-z and 3DMark 11.

Before we start to increase both the GPU core clock and memory clock speeds together, we find it much easier and less time consuming to focus on one area at a time. With this in mind, we started to increase the core clock speed to start things off, and was able to increase from the stock 1000MHz to 1100MHz, which was quite an achievement for a card of this nature, especially when you look at pre-factory overclocked 7770’s that can cost around £20 more, when we managed to get this performance for free. Though we were able to increase past 1100MHz, we found that when we started to combine the speed with an increased memory clock, we saw some slight artifacting in 3DMark and Furmark.

Moving on to the memory, we were able to get a small bump in performance from 1125MHz to 1200MHz, which isn’t the best we’ve seen, but is still “something for nothing” as they would say. The memory had the same scenario of being able to push past 1200MHz on its own, but as soon as we increased both clock speeds, we found their limits were exactly as you see above at 1100MHz on the GPU clock and 1200MHz on the memory clock.

For a low powered card with a simple cooling solution, we are quite proud of the modest increases that we saw and while we know we’ve seen better from cards with a better cooling solution, it is worth noting that these generally cost a considerable amount more over this particular card. Looking at the increase on both clocks, we saw a 10% increase on the core clock and a modest 6% on the memory clock and was verified stable by the use of 3DMark11 on Extreme, run multiple times.

Shortly after we had made sure that the clocks were stable, we ran the card back through a selection of our benchmarks and found that a slight increase had been seen across each with Heaven seeing an increase of 2fps at 1920×1080. Not a fantastic increase but still something for nothing.