Sapphire’s Overclocked to the Max HD 7770 GHz Edition

Performance Charts

Here we compare the HD 7770 at stock, at Sapphire’s GHz OverClocked edition factory speeds and also our maximum overclock at stock voltage and fan profile.

As we can see from our charts, most of our games show show the HD 7770 losing to last generation’s (and less expensive) HD 6870 and GTX 560.   The HD 7770 only comes fairly close to them performance-wise in a very few games and is playing catch-up with the rest.  We can surmise that the HD 7770 would be closer to the HD 6850 in performance but then the HD 6850 is priced to sell at considerably less.  Mostly the HD 7770 comes in ahead of HD 6770, and trades blows with the GTX 550 Ti, the Radeon winning more than it loses.  As a price comparison, the GTX 550 and the HD 6770 are considerably less expensive.  The GTX 560 Ti certainly outclasses them but then it is much more expensive.

At this moment in time, the HD 7770 is not a great value when you consider AMD’s own current midrange HD 6870 and 6850 which are less in price.  However, as a replacement for the HD 5770/HD6770, it affords a decent level of performance especially in the case of the overclocked Sapphire. Overclocking is the HD 7770’s saving grace (and this appears to be true with the entire 7000 series).  Best of all,  the Sapphire offers a guaranteed optimum overclock for $10 more than the stock HD 7770s. When the HD 68×0 series sells out, the HD 7770 will be a decent choice with the Sapphire GHz OC edition leading the way.  Of course looking a bit further into the future, we have to see what Nvidia will bring to the table with their own 28nm new architecture Kepler GPUs.

Overclocking and temperatures

The Sapphire HD 7770 GHz OverClock Edition always ran cool and quiet due to its custom cooling and superb tuning at the factory.  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 only+50MHz more and no fan adjustment allowed it to go higher as it was still running cool, so we kept the stock fan profile.