Sapphire HD 7770 FleX edition brings inexpensive Eyefinity to gaming and productivity

Unboxing the Sapphire HD 7770 FleX GHz edition

The Sapphire HD 7770 FleX GHz edition comes in a box with a fully-armed G.I. Jane type of picture that emphasises that Sapphire means business with this card. FleX, 1GB GGR5, high-speed HDMI and a substantial overclock stand out to catch the consumer’s eye at retail.

The other side of the FleX box is dedicated to another view of Sapphire’s mascott and to the card’s features. The potential buyer at retail can see what is included with the HD 7770 FleX – assorted cables , the driver CD and the quickstart manual.  It advises, “Experience the Extreme of Revolutionary GPU Design”

The end panels are pretty plain although the specifications are on one panel. Opening the box, we see that everything is well-packed and the FleX HD 7770 card itself comes in an anti-static foam-protected envelope.

Here is everything out of the box.

We see a single molex to 6-pin PCIe connector which suggests that this card is very light on power usage. Included is a 1.8 meter (six foot)HDMI cable, a DVI to VGA adapter, and a HDMI to single-link passive DVI adapter for the ability to set up 3-display Eyefinity with DVI connectors.   Compare to a typical HD 7770 (Vapor-X, below right) where you would need to purchase a DisplayPort to DVI adapter to run 3-panel Eyefinity. It is a very useful bundle that has sufficient flexibility for most users who do not have native DisplayPort LCDs and it will save them money on adapters that are required for most Radeons.  Most graphics cards based on AMD technology require the third monitor in an Eyefinity set-up to be a DisplayPort monitor, or connected with an active DisplayPort Adapter. To simplify your life and to save you money, the Sapphire FleX family can support three DVI monitors in Eyefinity mode and deliver a true SLS (Single Large Surface) work area without the need for active adapters.

With FleX, the first two monitors are connected to the two DVI ports (the top one is Dual-link DVI and the bottom is Single-Link DVI) and the third to an HDMI to DVI cable (supplied) with no extra active hardware required. Best of all, the DisplayPort outputs are still available for the connection of additional monitors.  This is an entry level solution but the recently announced Sapphire HD 7950 FleX with its two DisplayPort outputs can support up to 5 screens in Eyefinity.

Communication with the host PC is optimized with the latest implementation of the high speed PCI-Express Gen3.0 interface, and two HD 7770s (or it can be paired with a HD 7750) cards can be used to further enhance performance in CrossFireX mode on a suitable motherboard.

The HDMI specifications have also increased in the HD 7000 series. Fast HDMI 1.4a supports Stereoscopic 3D with enhanced frame rates of 60Hz per eye – 120Hz total. It is also ready for the next generation of 4K displays that can be driven from a single high speed input of 3GHz HDMI 1.4a or DisplayPort 1.2 HBR2.

Sapphire has created a well-designed, good-looking card with a single cooling fan.

 Sapphire has added extra cooling to the card in the form of heatpipes to keep a potential overclock stable. There is a single 6-pin PCIe connection.

Turning the card over …

This card is easy to fit into any mid-tower and even into smaller cases as the card is physically short at about eight and one-quarter inches long. The card is packed well and looks great!

Our 3 ASUS 23-inch 1920×1080 displays connected easily to the Sapphire HD 7770 Flex GHz edition using two DVI connectors and the third used the supplied HDMI to DVI adapter or connected directly using the HDMI cable.  Since we only had this card for a single day, we did not test gaming on it.  Older and less demanding games should be fine but we suspect that most users will buy this card for productivity over 3 panels.

Let’s take a look at our test system before we benchmark the Sapphire HD 7770 FleX GHz edition against the Sapphire HD 7770 GHz OverClock edition and also against a GTX 550 Ti which is in about the same price/performance class but without the ability to use 3-displays in Nvidia’s Surround as the latest generation Kepler cards can.  At this point, however, Nvidia does not have a 28nm native 3-panel competing solution except in the Galaxy’s own 40nm “MDT” GTX 560 which uses Galaxy drivers.