XFX Radeon HD 7770 Black Edition Overclocked 1GB Graphics Card Review

AMD and Nvidia both have major partners who supply their own range of products by utilising the GPUs supplied by these two big players in the market. One of the major brands for AMD is XFX who have been in the graphics card industry for many, many years and have a huge variety of products in their lineup. Included in this lineup is a range that they brand as Black Edition which simply put is the crème de la crème, denoting that the range is something special over your ordinary run of the mill cards, by use of a custom cooler design, pre-factory overclock speeds and much more, and XFX have brought this special branding to a selection of their new 7000 series Radeon graphics cards. Among this series of cards, we find the HD 7770 getting the special treatment and that's exactly what we have on offer today, and though the 7770 isn't the best performing graphics card in the world, it does offer a great per/performance comparison and if the Black Edition stigma is anything to go by from what we've seen in the past, then it should do wonders for making the HD 7770 even better value for money in the retail channel. As per usual, we have a lot to go through and before we can delve straight into the performance side of things, we have to take a look at the styling and design behind the card, as I do believe that the design on these XFX cards are some of the hottest around. Before we get into that, we have to take a look to see what's going on with the packaging and bundle, especially as we saw our award logo sitting along the top, so it would be rude not to, right? Follow us through the review, where we will see what the XFX Radeon HD 7770 Black Edition Overclocked graphics card with its fancy dual fan design can do when pitted against other cards from a variety of brands. XFX have opted for a dark branded box with a brightly coloured logo taking centre stage. A few details on the Double Dissipation cooler is featured below the model name and some of the main features of the card are also listed clearly. Flipping the box over, we are able to find a bit of information on the performance and design of the card, as you'd expect on a box of this nature. Opening the box up, we can see that we're bombarded by paperwork and other novel items but nothing of major use. Inside of a PSU leaflet, a door hanger, install guide and driver CD, limited warranty leaflet, quick install guide, warning leaflets, some sales promotional pamphlets and a Black Edition case badge. Moving the accessories to one side, we can start to look at the card and straight away you will notice that this looks like a slightly smaller version of the 7950 Black Edition that we looked at back in January. It features the same stylish metal design with dual transluscent fans and subtle XFX branding. It's definitely one of the best looking coolers we've seen and from our experience, also does a fantastic job of keeping things cool and quiet. As with a typical 7770 card, we find a single 6-pin PCI-Express connector on the end of the card. Along the top of the card, we find an individual CrossFire connector towards the rear of the card to give the extra functionality when wanting to run two Radeon HD 7770 graphics cards together. Finally taking a look at the rear I/O, we find two DVI connectors, a DisplayPort connector and HDMI. Also, XFX decided to spruce things up a bit by cutting their wording into the expansion plate to firstly look cool, and to secondly give some ventilation from the card, out to the rear of your chassis. As this card is part of the GHz branding, we should expect at least a GPU clock speed of 1000MHz, but XFX not being content on losing out to the competition, they have boosted things slightly faster to 1095MHz. The memory has also been ramped up from 1125MHz to a respectable 1245MHz . The rest of the specifications are typical of what we'd expect from a Cape Verde based GPU. 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 3 x AOC E2795VH We would like to thank AOC, Asus, Corsair, Kingston, and Lian Li for supplying us with our test system components. Games used: Aliens Vs Predator Batman: Arkham City Mafia II Metro 2033 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. Getting the ball rolling with 3DMark11, we can see that the XFX HD 7770 Black Edition OC ends up at the top of or bundle of 7700 series cards, beating offerings from Sapphire and of course reference AMD cards. Heaven 2.5 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. Heaven showed a similar story, with some slight increased by 1-2FPS over the competition cards from Sapphire and 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. Within a real world game, we see the XFX card being beaten by 1FPS across all resolutions to the Sapphire HD 7770 OC Vapor-X. Batman: Arkham City was release late in 2011 as a sequal to Arkham Asylum. The game uses large scale mapping with heavy effects on lighting and the environment along with a lot of tessellation in a fast moving gaming scene. It utilises DirectX 11 for shadows, lighting, reflections and particles to give the best gaming experience possible. In Batman, the XFX card manages to regain its title but once again only by 1-2 FPS across a multitude of resolutions. Mafia II is an older game and therefore it does have older graphics engines, however this is is still a good all-round in game benchmark that combines the terrain and explosion rendering of Crysis with the dust and dirt particle rendering test of Dirt 2. It also takes into account the changing light conditions albeit not in quite the same detail as the others, but none-the-less still proves a cards capabilities on slightly older games. Mafia II saw the XFX and Sapphire OC cards battle it out but return with the same results. At both single resolutions, the settings used would be fine to run the game with playable frame rates. 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. Lastly in our performance benchmarks, we can see the Sapphire OC card just pushing past the XFX offering by 1FPS giving us a playable frame rate at 1680x1050 though we would advise to tweak the display options further to get a better set of FPS. 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. Due to the double fan design, we do hold high hopes for this card in terms of cooling performance. When taking a look at the noise output of the card, while it's a little bit noisier than other 7770 cards at load, it still remains quieter than the reference 7770 XT from AMD. 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 wise, we see the card falling inline with the other cards from the 7770 series with the power just peaking above 200 Watts in load conditions. 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. Rounding things up with temperatures, we can see the XFX 7770 Black Edition OC giving reasonable levels at 40 degrees idle and 69 degrees load which isn't as strong as the Sapphire Vapor-X and fleX edition cards, but once again managed to push forward when comparing to the reference card from AMD. From our charts, we can clearly see that the card has some good figures, especially when looking at the value behind the card and the 7770 as a whole. Due to the factory overclock speeds, we have managed to see some nice boosts in performance, but we wanted to see if we could push things even further by overclocking both the GPU clock and memory clock speeds to squeeze every last piece of performance from this card. We will be using the typical suite of applications including MSI's Afterburner, GPU-z, Furmark and 3DMark 11. We stick to these programs as they are favoured in the community and give strong results when we've used them in the past. As always, we started by increasing the GPU clock on its own first to see how far it can be pushed, and then turn our focus to the memory. Once we've found the maximum speeds for both clocks, we try them together, which sometimes gives fantastic results, though other times find that we need to claw back the speeds slightly to get them playing ball with each other. After tweaking for quite some time with the help of our benchmarking and overclocking tools, we settled the card on 1230MHz, an increase of 135MHz (12.3%) on the GPU clock and a smaller, yet still good increase of 1265MHz from 1245MHz giving us an increase of 20MHz (1.6%). While the memory overclock wasn't astounding, we've found from previous experience that results are bettered by pushing the GPU core clock to the limits instead. After we had overclocked and ran 3DMark11, we continued to run the rest of our benchmark tools to confirm stability and found that at the speeds above, the card remained stable with only a slight temperature increase. It's been quite some time since we took a look at a XFX card, but whenever we do, we end up leaving with a smile on our faces, whether it's down to the card as a whole, the styling cooling properties or sheer performance and for me today, it would have to be the whole card. I made it clear earlier on in the review, that I'm very partial to the design of the cooler on this card, as it looks very sleek and gives a slight upper market feel to the card in general. While the cooler looks nice, it wasn't as strong in the tests as other cards from the likes of Sapphire, but is of course still a fantastic improvement over a reference card. This can be said about the acoustics and temperatures that we saw and even the power draw was reasonable considering the much higher clock speed that this card comes equipped with as standard. In terms of performance, we saw a few ups and downs across our benchmark suite, with the card primarily peaking above the competitor cards due to its factory overclock speeds, and on that note we were able to increase things quite dramatically. The memory clock didn't seem to budget much in terms of speed, especially when paired with a higher GPU clock speed too. The core clock did see quite a large increase in speed, leading to some slight performance gains, and as we always say; "getting something extra for nothing is always good in my books". Priced competitively at around £110-£120, it certainly offers fantastic value for money, especially when sizing it up against the other brands in the market and what they have on offer. The factory overclock and stylish design of the cooler certainly add to this value too, which for me makes purchasing decisions seem a lot easier to make. One thing I would have liked to have seen is a slightly faster clock speed from standard, as we were able to push things a lot further, but this could involve us having one of the lucky cards and when mass producing a card like this, you need to make sure that all cards under that particular sku can do those speeds too. If you're in the market for a new graphics card and want to dabble in a bit of gaming, while tempting some of the more extreme settings, and also being stuck on a budget, then you'll find this is one of the best value Radeon HD 7770's in the market, and with a brand like XFX offering a good warranty, support and a nice looking and performing card, we don't think you can really go wrong.