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

Performance Charts, Overclocking, and Noise

Overclocking and temperatures

The Sapphire HD 7770 GHz FleX GHz Edition always ran cool and quiet due to its custom cooling. Even at the maximum overclock, the fan still did not ramp up loudly and one would not be irritated by even 70% if they used a manual profile.

The card sips power due to using just one 6-pin PCIe slot and takes advantage of the smaller 28nm process.  We were able to achieve an identical core and memory overclock to match the GHz edition at 1100/1300MHz exactly and we kept the stock fan profiles and voltage settings in our testing.

Overclocking

Overclocking was easily accomplished using Sapphire’s own TriXX software

TriXX compares favorably with other vendor’s perhaps more well-known software. It allows some voltage tweaking and we set ours to the maximum when we overclocked. We did not adjust the fan profile as the card stayed cool under maximum load; we would have liked more voltage. Surprisingly, Sapphire makes no mention of TriXX on their CD or on the FleX box although you can find it on their web site.

If the end user wants a bit more overclocking headroom or perhaps to stabilize an overclock, they have the option to increase the fan speeds and still have very quiet gaming. About 60% is where it first starts to become noticeable. Other than that, the single-fan solution of the FleX edition is effectively silent during gaming. It is very slightly quieter than the OverClock edition which is already a quiet running card.

Performance Charts

Before we look specifically at the performance of the new Sapphire FleX HD 7770, please review the position the Sapphire’s GHz OverClocked edition  (1150MHz/1250MHz) occupies versus a reference HD 7770 (1000/1125MHz), and also overclocked to 1200/1250MHz.  In that evaluation, we also compared the OverClocked Edition against the GTX 550 Ti, the GTX 560 and the GTX 560 Ti, as well as AMD’s own discounted HD 6870 and the HD 6770 that the HD 7770 is replacing.

The FlexX Edition will match the reference 1000/1125MHz HD 7770 in general gaming performance.  We reused our benches from last month’s Sapphire HD 7750 review where we tested a stock HD 7770 GHz edition at identical clocks to the FleX edition.  We double-checked most of the benches and they are effectively identical with slight variations but all within the generally accepted 1-3% margin of benching error and frame rate rounding.  And since we were able to match the GHz edition’s 1100/1300MHz clocks with our FleX edition by overclocking using TriXX, we expect exactly the same level of performance from overclocking.

As can be seen from our chart, most of our games show the HD 7770 FleX beating the GTX 550 Ti, the Radeon winning more than it loses and also having far more flexibility when it comes to displays.  Most users will be buying the HD 7770 FleX GHz edition for productivity but it should be able to handle some light gaming over 3-panel Eyefinity.