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Tried it: AMD Radeon HD 7770 - Cape Verde on the stage

Tried it: AMD Radeon HD 7770 - Cape Verde on the stage

After many high-end video card tests, we are now paddling into friendlier-priced waters with the help of the stronger Cape Verde, meaning in this article, we’ll examine the performance and other features of the Radeon HD 7770 using two models. How good a card is, and how good a buy today is for an AMD Radeon HD 7770, will be revealed at the end of our article.

cape mint logo

 

Technológia

 

In a slightly celebratory way, in connection with our article "AMD Radeon HD 7870/7850 - dangerous pit bulls", we have already pulled the veil off the Cape Verde GPU, which serves on the Radeon HD 7700 series controllers. Based on the results, the novelty is (unfortunately) not a big bang in terms of performance. We still understand why entry-level graphics cards wither away, but it is more difficult to find an explanation in the mid-range segment.

 

The Cape Verde chip covers just 28 square millimeters thanks to TSMC’s 123nm manufacturing technology and engineers ’tightness. The chip contains 1,5 billion transistors, so its transistor density is good, although Pitcairn was able to surpass even that. AMD was actually in a very easy position with the Radeon HD 7700 series, as the HD 6700 is just the result of a renaming, so you practically have to compete against video cards based on the nearly two-and-a-half-year-old Juniper GPU. The paper form didn’t come in completely after all, which is due to the fact that the size of Cape Verde is only moving at the level of the Redwood chip. It’s easy to see that a tile this size won’t break 3D Mark records.

 

7700-specs

 

The most powerful member of the Radeon HD 7700 series hides 10 GCN arrays, equivalent to a total of 640 stream processors. The number of texturing units was proportionally reduced to 40. There was also a significant cut in the backend, bringing the total capacity of the memory controller to 128 bits and the number of rasterizers to 16. The latter units peak in the 4 ROP clusters, with a total of 64 Z samplers. The default video memory size is 1024 MB. Of course, the 2GB package is also feasible, although we have not seen an example of this yet.

 

small slide

 

After that, it’s no surprise at all that the Radeon HD 7770 doesn’t humiliate its predecessor, although thankfully the high clocks somewhat offset the shortcomings. The size of the second-level cache is 512 Kbyte, and the peak computing power at double precision is 80 GFLOP / s, which is exactly sixteen times the single-precision processing speed. They do not refer to a GPGPU monster…

 

It is a huge positive that the list of supported services has remained intact. In addition to a relatively affordable price tag, you can get a graphics card that includes UVD 3.0, VCE (the AMD equivalent of Intel Quick Sync Video), and is familiar with DirectX 11.1, ZeroCore Power, Eyefinity 2.0, and AMD PRT technology. We would highlight the ZeroCore procedure, which is not a negligible factor in bringing a high-performance HTPC configuration to life.

 

Of course, the PCI-Express 3.0 standard is also unknown to the novice, but at this level it really doesn’t have much use anymore. It is not incidental that the image quality is also unchanged, which is extremely pleasing in the case of the improved anisotropic filter algorithm. We would note here that we deliberately do not elaborate on the above procedures, as we have done so several times in our previous articles.

 

Features 

Obviously, for Radeon HD 7700 members, 1 monitor is enough for games, but we must not forget how much efficiency a display can throw for a workstation. Another interesting feature of Eyefinity 2.0 is that it allows you to conduct multi-monitor conference calls with multi-band audio. The official name of the procedure is Discrete Digital Multi-Point (DDM) Audio.

 

Relatively modest performance is accompanied by favorable consumption. The typical consumption of the Radeon HD 7770 is 80 watts. The GHz Edition mark can also be found here, which is intended to indicate that the product has reached an operating frequency of 1 GHz. The smaller model can now handle up to 55 watts, so you don't need an additional power plug. Crazy about PowerTune technology, the latter card is almost no longer heated and doesn’t need to be cooled.

 

IMG0035352 

All in all, we can say that the Cape Verde chip has not become bad at all, but the graphics cards built on it need to be handled in place. In fact, every star except performance is five (consumption, image quality, features and functions), and that’s definitely a good thing. Due to the favorable energy demand, passive cooling solutions may come to the fore again, which we now dare to offer, especially at the small salt. It would definitely be worthwhile for engineers to think about filling the gigantic gap between the Radeon HD 7850 and HD 7770. A further silly Pitcairn-based card seems to be an ideal candidate for the task.

 

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