The Passive Gigabyte & Overclocked HIS HD 6770 meet the EVGA GTX 550 Ti

We have completed our AMD Graphics’ HD 6000 series versus Nvidia’s 500 series evaluations from their top dual-GPU $750 monster cards down to their entry level video cards.  Both companies together with their partners have had time and the resources to fully round out their impressive line-up and today we are going to look at AMD’s bread and butter lineup and compare two very different HD 6770s – a passively-cooled Gigabyte and an overclocked HIS IceQ X Turbo – against Nvidia GTX 550 Ti as represented by the EVGA version.which we reviewed in April of this year.  And of course, we are going to be looking at performance versus value to see if these cards can still be called “gaming” cards with an emphasis on DX11.

Nearly two years ago, on October 2009, AMD released the ATI Radeon HD 5770 graphics card. This product featured AMD’s Eyefinity Technology and they were among the first cards to have Direct 11 compatibility and Shader Model 5 support. The ATI Radeon HD 5770 had extraordinary performance for its price point and it has been one of the most successful products in the AMD lineup.  AMD has continued the ATI Radeon HD 5770 legacy by adding some features and rebranding it as the HD 6770 GPU.  And we are going to look at two very different HD 6770s from a performance standpoint.

The Radeon HD 6770 is a slightly updated version and a rebrand of the HD 5770.  Although they use the same core, The Radeon 6770 has an improved video playback engine, BluRay 3D support and HDMI 1.4a.  One might believe that these are among the least interesting cards to gamers yet they can tell us much about the architecture of their respective series. We are going to evaluate the mid-overclocked EVGA GTX 550 Ti and compare it to the two HD 6770s – the passively-cooled Gigabyte version and the HIS turbo-overclocked version.   All of these cards were created to compete at the $150 price point when they were first released.

These video cards are all similarly-priced gaming solutions.  The HIS IceQ Turbo X sells at Newegg for $120 after a ten dollar mail in rebate; the passively-cooled GIGABYTE GV-R677SL-1GD sells for $138 with a free copy of DiRT 3; and the EVGA GTX 550 Ti is on a Newegg weekend special for $110 after a $20 mail-in-rebate.  The EVGA GTX 550 TI is their middle-overclocked version and the least expensive versions start at about $99 after rebate while the HD 6770’s bottom pricing is about $89 after rebate in the USA.

We want to put together a complete picture for you as we are here to help you to determine what these new video cards bring as we continue to focus on gaming performance. And most importantly, we will let you know if you should even bother to use them for DX11 PC gaming at all or just buy them primarily for home theater PC (HTPC) and use them for light gaming.

We put our two HD 6770 Radeon cards through their paces this week with the very latest Catalyst beta performance drivers 11.8.  This driver brought some good performance increases over the WHQL 11-7 Catalyst drivers. We also used the 280.26 WHQL drivers for the GeForce cards that were released last week which also brought good performance increases over the launch drivers for the GTX 550 Ti.

Is the GTX 550 Ti and the HD 6770 worth about the same price?

We naturally want to know if the HD 6770 is worth the same approximately $130 as the stock and overclocked GTX 550 Ti which are now regularly in about the same price range. Please note that we are also testing cards that cost up to $140 so you can see where these cards fit in as to performance and features. We will do the testing and then you can answer these questions for yourself together with us in our conclusion.

We now bench with 20 modern games and with 3 synthetic benchmarks generally using 1920×1200 and 1680×1050 resolutions and with an emphasis on DX11 games – 1 open GL, 4 DX9, 5 DX10, and 10 DX11 games.  We will also overclock our Radeons and bench some games at the super-widescreen resolution of 5780×1060 and with CrossFired HD 6770s.  We will let you know if the Passively-cooled Gigabyte and the HIS Turbo IceQ HD 6770s play well together in CrossFire and what their temperatures are like.

Since we are using mid-level enthusiast GPU video cards, it makes sense to test them at their highest playable resolutions and with the most demanding playable settings that they can handle. And of course we will attempt to find playable settings bearing in mind that they are aimed approximately at 1920×1080 resolution.  Let’s take a look at each of our competing cards.