Sapphire Radeon HD 7770 Overclock Edition 1GB Graphics Card Review

When buying a card, its looks are one of the first things after its specs that we notice, and here the plastic cover that surrounds the heatsink we feel is rather stylish. On top of this are two carbon effect stickers highlighting the cards model to one side of the fan and on the other side we have the AMD Graphics logo.

Lying at the heart of Sapphire’s cooler, we have an ~85mm fan, which going by past cooler designs we expect to be just as quiet under load as it is at idle speeds.

On the end of the card we find the single 6-pin auxiliary power connection for giving the 7770 the extra power it needs under load.

As we found with the reference 7770 card, there is support for 2 way CrossFireX and so we find a single connection on the top for connection two cards together.

Sticking with the stock output collection, we have two mini DisplayPort 1.2, HDMI, and a dual-link DVI port.  Above the large grill allows for heat dissipation out the rear of the card.

As we are all getting to know, Sapphire’s cooling department are always able to pull something special out of the bag and this is no exception. Here we find a heatpipe based cooler with two large heatpipes leading to either end of the card. At the contect point Sapphire have got a copper plate for the best thermal transfer through to the heatsink.

Delving under the cooler we can get a closer look of the inner workings of the card. Following the reference design, Sapphire has used their own bespoke PCB and like the 7770 we find the there seems to be a lot of spare pace to play around with towards the end of the board.

At stock the 7770 takes its claim to fame, boasting a 1GHz clock speed and a memory clock of 1125MHz. Sapphire have taken the 7770 OC to the next level raising the core clock speed to 1150MHz (1.15GHz) and the memory speed up to 1250MHz (5GHz effective).