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

Sapphire again have done a great job on customizing the Radeon HD 7770, by offering something that no other brand partner seems to be able to do, and this is a great selling point for Sapphire. It opens up a huge scope for users wanting to get the very best out of their system, without spending an absolute fortune. For those who have never used a triple screen environment, take it from someone who uses it every day of the week; it’s AWESOME. You will almost find that going back to a single screen device, such as a notebook can feel slightly inferior.

The fact that the bundle comes inclusive of a HDMI to DVI adapter adds to the sheer value that the 7770 card is all about and with a quiet cooler and good, strong performance, we can’t help but feel Sapphire have hit the nail on the head with this one.

Priced at around £120/$150 it keeps its foot in the door when comparing against similar cards from rival brands, but offers that little bit extra due to the fleX technology.

One thing we would have liked to have seen was a slight boost in the clock speed up to around 1100MHz as we’ve seen with other sku’s of the 7770 from Sapphire, but these particular cards did have vapor-chamber cooling which may allow for the extra heat from an overclock. The fleX, whilst it has a good cooler, it may be limited possibly by the clock speed of the GPU core, hence it being at stock GHz speeds. Though as you saw, we managed to get to this speed, the increase in performance was negligible, but as long as the temperatures and acoustics would remain fairly low, I can’t see any harm in Sapphire doing this overclock for you and slapping their warranty along with it too.

For those on a budget, we can’t help but recommend buying this card, and with the ability to CrossFire with a second card later down the line, it seems that this card is simply oozing with value and will be a great upgrade for anyone, whether they be on older technology, or an embedded solution. Either way, you won’t be disappointed.

The innovation behind the fleX technology still blows my mind, as to how they can manage to offer what so many other brands can’t, but by doing it at an affordable price. If you are looking at spending little cash and want a nice boost in performance over your current system, then the 7770 is a great card offering the latest AMD technologies and for those wanting something extra on top, Sapphire have come along and done it again with their fleX technology. All we can hope is that they start to develop fleX on a lot more of their range and maybe couple it in with Vapor-X to give some extreme cooling at the same time, to allow for a hefty overclock.