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

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.