Review: Sapphire Vapor-X Radeon HD 7770 1GB OC

When we first reviewed the AMD Radeon HD 7770, we found it a good budget video card. It offered decent HTPC capabilities, plus some acceptable gaming performance to boot, as long as you didn’t mind using ‘medium’ quality settings on most modern games to keep the frame rates up.

Here we have an overclocked version of the HD 7770 from Sapphire, which features its patented Vapor-X vapour chamber fan-cooling technology.

Where the reference HD 7770 card ran at a 1GHz core speed and 4.5GHz memory speed, this Sapphire model kicks things up a notch, running at 1.1GHz on the core and 5.2GHz on the memory. All other specifications remain the same: 1GB of GDDR5 memory on a 128bit bus, and 640 stream processors with DX11.1 support.

The dual-slot Vapor-X cooling system is excellent for a purportedly ‘budget’ video card: two 80mm fans cover a large array of aluminium fins fed by two thick heatpipes.

For display connectivity you get two DVI ports, one DisplayPort and one HDMI port. Sapphire also throws in a 1.8m HDMI cable.

In the performance results, this HD 7770 gets outmuscled by the Nvidia GTX 650 Ti which we also tested this month. Having said that, it’ss actually churning out more performance per dollar, so this comes out as the most economical of the tested models.

It would be nice to have some of the overseas price-drops flow through to New Zealand a bit quicker – the HD 7770 launched at $239 and more than six months later this model still sells for about $229. Even so, it’s good to see that this card still represents good value for the gamer on a budget.




Test system: IntelCore i5 3570K @ 4.5GHz, 2x2GB Kingston DDR3-2133 CL9 memory, 120GB MX-DS SATAII SSD, Windows 7 SP1