The Passive Gigabyte & Overclocked HIS HD 6770 meet the EVGA GTX 550 Ti
Conclusion
This has been quite an enjoyable exploration for us in revisiting our EVGA GTX 550 Ti evaluation 5 months after launch and comparing it to the HD 6770. We are a bit unhappy with a straight rebrand of the HD 6770 – with only a few new features including HDMI 1.4 so you can enjoy HD3D and BluRay movies. Of course, we would always like more performance especially for DX11 gaming, but we see that these sub-$150 cards offer great features for a lower price than the HD 5770s at their own launch.
We see that AMD’s partners are working on features and unique capabilities to put passively-cooled and quiet overclocked HD 6770s on the market to give us great choice. We see good overclockability from even a passively-cooled card and either of these cards would be a great choice for HTPC, the Gigabyte card being the overall quietest card. So let’s look at the Pros and Cons of each HD 6770:
HD 6770
Pros
- Price – for sub-$150 it is a versatile card that can be used for light DX11 gaming or as a HTPC card – “all-in-one”
- HD 6770 offers HDMI 1.4, HD3D and BluRay playback not found in the HD 5770 series
- CrossFire will bring two of these cards up to HD 6970 speeds
Gigabye HD 6770
- Unique product – an almost-silent card that can be used for HTPC and light DX11 gaming.Further customization possible by adding fans!
HIS HD 6770
- And inexpensive and good-looking videocard that overclocks well, stays cool and is quiet!
- DiRT 3 download included!
Cons
- There is no performance improvement over the HD 5770;HD 6770 is a rebrand.
- Performance is low for 2011’s DX11 cards
- The GTX 550 Ti offers excellent competition with its own feature set and great performance
HIS HD 6770
- none
Gigabyte HD 6770
- Somewhat expensive at $138 and the evaluation sample was not “dead silent”
The Verdict:
- If you are buying a sub $150 right now the HD 6770 is a great value and bang-for-buck gaming video card that will do double duty as a gaming card for light DX11 titles and also as a HTPC card. They offer a great feature set including offering 3-panel Eyefinity from a single card.
We do not know what the future will bring, but these HD 6770s bring decent performers to the Radeon family. This editor believes that AMD and their partners bring very full-featured DX11 videocards to the market that will find good acceptance among customers and their fans alike.
If you currently game on an older generation video card, you will do yourself a big favor by upgrading. The move to a HD 6770 will give you better visuals on the DX11 pathway and you are no doubt thinking of CrossFire-X if you want to get even higher performance. Perhaps you want to use Eyefinity’s multi-panel display which we will continue to explore in future articles versus 3-panel Surround.
The competition is hot as the prices on even the new video cards have softened and Nvidia offers their own set of features including PhysX, CUDA and 3D Vision with their GTX 550 Ti. Stay tuned, there is a lot coming from us at ABT. Stay tuned for a brand new evaluation of Stereoscopic 3D – 5 months of investigation – with Part One of our “3D Vision Mega Evaluation – Gimmick or the Future of Gaming?” due this week.
Mark Poppin
ABT Senior Editor
Please join us in our Forums
Become a Fan on Facebook
Follow us on Twitter
For the latest updates from ABT, please join our RSS News Feed
Join our Distributed Computing teams
- Folding@Home – Team AlienBabelTech – 164304
- SETI@Home – Team AlienBabelTech – 138705
- World Community Grid – Team AlienBabelTech
