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

The HIS IceQ Turbo X HD 6770

The HIS card boasts a small overclock over the stock (and Gigabyte) versions – from 850/1200MHz to 880MHz/1250.  We naturally want to know if there is any further room for overclocking and if the relatively small overclock makes a performance difference over the stock version.

Here are the specifications from the HIS website:

Model Name	HIS 6770 IceQ X Turbo 1GB GDDR5 PCI-E DP/2xDVI/HDMI
Chipset	Radeon HD 6770 PCIe Series
ASIC	RadeonTM HD 6770 GPU
Manu. Process (Micron)	40nm
Memory Size (MB)	1024
Memory Type	GDDR5
Engine CLK (MHz)	880Mhz
Memory CLK (Gbps)	5Gbps
Memory Interface (bit)	128
Power Supply Requirement	450 Watt or greater power
Max. Resolution	2560*1600
Bus Interface	PCI Express x16
Display Port	Yes
HDMI	Yes
DVI	2x Dual-link DVI-I
VGA	No

The HIS IceQ X Turbo box pictured above

HD 6770 System Requirement

• PCI Express® based PC is required with one X16 lane graphics slot available on the motherboard
• 450 Watt or greater power supply with one 75W 6-pin PCI Express® power connectors recommended (600 Watt and two 6-pin connectors for AMD CrossFireX™ technology in dual mode).
• Certified power supplies are recommended. Refer to http://ati.amd.com/certifiedPSU for a list of Certified products
• Minimum 1GB of system memory
• Installation software requires CD-ROM drive or DVD-ROM drive, a keyboard, a mouse, and a display
• DVD playback requires DVD drive and a DVD
• Blu-ray™ playback requires Blu-ray drive
• For an AMD CrossFireX™ system, a second AMD Radeon™ HD 6770 Graphics card, an AMD CrossFireX™ Ready motherboard and one AMD CrossFireX™ Bridge Interconnect cable is required
• Use of 3 or more displays with AMD Eyefinity technology requires a DisplayPort-capable panel or an AMD Eyefinity validated dongle. See http://www.amd.com/EyefinityDongles for a list of validated DisplayPort dongles.

Above we see the features on the back of the box – quietness is stressed!  Below, as we unpack it, we just can’t help think of a shoe box.

Here are the contents above and below.  One of the features of this card is that DiRT 3 is available as a digital download!

We see the heatpipes as we turn the HIS 6770 over.

Unlike the Gigabyte HD 6770 with one DVI connector, the HIS IceQ X Turbo HD 6770 comes with two DVI connectors as well as a HDMI and a DisplayPort connection.  If you only have DVI-enabled displays, you will only need one $30 adapter – not two – for 3-panel Eyefinity where there are no native DisplayPort connections.

We can’t wait to test out our cards.

CrossFiring The Gigabyte and the HIS HD 6770s?

Yes!

Both the HIS and the Gigabyte HD 6770s will CrossFire together.  However, it is admittedly an odd pairing and one would wonder if the top passively-cooled card will work well together with a hot card on the bottom.  Read on as we cover it in the final sections of our evaluation.  But first, let’s look at Nvidia’s offering, the EVGA overclocked GTX 550 Ti.