At first I would like to thank XFX for sending a sample of their Radeon HD 7770 Black Super Overclocked Edition featuring Double Dissipation for testing and reviewing.

 

About XFX:

"XFX dares to go where the competition would like to, but can’t. That’s because, at XFX, we don’t just create great digital video components—we build all-out, mind-blowing, performance-crushing, competition-obliterating video cards and motherboards. And, not only are they amazing, you don’t have to live on dry noodles and peanut butter to afford them.

 

XFX is a division of PINE Technology Holdings Limited, a leading manufacturer and marketer of innovative solutions for the worldwide gaming technologies market. Founded in 1989, PINE designs, develops, manufactures and distributes high-performance video graphics technology and computer peripherals. The company’s dedicated research and development team are continually pushing the limits to meet the demands of the ever-growing and performance-driven community. Headquartered in the Hong Kong Special Administrative Region (Hong Kong SAR), PINE has more than 1,000 employees worldwide with 16 offices around the globe. PINE also maintains four state-of-the-art research and development facilities in the Asia Pacific region and two factories in Mainland China. To learn more about PINE, please visit www.pinegroup.com."

As we have seen from AMD’s previous slides, during the launch of the 7900 series, the “Southern Islands” line is divided in three segments each having different performances. First we have the “Tahiti”, which is the new high end and incorporates the Radeon HD 7970 and 7950 cards, “Pitcairn”, which cards are not launched yet and of course, “Cape Verde”, which aims at the budget conscious people, and is meant to bring a good balance between power, price and power consumption.

 

 

 

The representatives of “Cape Verde” are Radeon HD 7750 and 7770 and the card we will look upon now is the XFX Radeon HD 7770 Black Super Overclocked Edition, featuring Double Dissipation. As the name says, this model is pre-overclocked and features a dual fan cooling system. Here are the differences in specifications between the OEM model from AMD and the offering from XFX:

 

 

 

Like the 7970, the 7770 cards are built upon the 28nm architecture and come with the same features as the high-end GPUs; from these we can enumerate Eyefinity 2.0, PowerTune, ZeroCore Power, DX 11.1 hardware support, PCI-E Gen 3 and so on.

 

At this point you may say: cool, but what has been cut then to meet these price points? Well, AMD has reduced the GPU architecture to 10 compute units (640 stream processors) and now the memory bus is only 128-bit wide. The smaller brother, Radeon HD 7750 has 512 stream processors and shares the same 128-bit memory bus.

 

 

 

Like at any new GPU launch, manufacturers also bring on the market pre-overclocked editions. For the 7770 series, XFX comes with the Radeon HD 7770 Core edition and Radeon HD 7770 Double Disipation Edition, which sport the clocks of the OEM model; next, there is the Radeon HD 7770 Black Edition along with the Double Disipation Edition which have the GPU clock raised to 1095MHz. Lastly we have the highest clocked card from the bunch, the Radeon HD 7770 Black Super Overclocked Edition featuring Double Dissipation.

 

The XFX Radeon HD Black Super Overclocked Edition DD comes with a bunch of features and technologies concerning hardware design that XFX likes to call XFACTOR. These include:

 

•GPU Edging: Black Edition Selection Process

•Double Dissipation

•Ghost Thermal Technology

•Duratec: Solid Capacitors

•Duratec: IP-5X Dust Free Fan

•Duratec: XFX Bracket

 

GPU Edging is an exclusive XFX Black Edition Selection Process to identify the top 1% of GPUs capable of reaching maximum overclock speeds. But unlike factory overclock and maximum overclock which only increases wattage to increase clock speeds, the high quality Duratec components allows the manufacturer to do the same but keeping the overall card wattage the same as a standard card by lower overall wattage loss.

 

 

 

• Higher Clock Speeds than standard

• Same Wattage as standard cards

• Top 1% of GPUs

• Highest performance with same power

consumption

• Outperforms the competition time and time again

 

Ghost Thermal Technology -> Through rigorous testing and analysis, the manufacturer has discovered the optimal thermal design that allows air to pass through the heatsink directly to the PCB and core components. Older enclosed designs often trapped the heat creating a bottle neck at the exhaust, this can be remedied but at the cost of a higher fan speed which creates excess noise. The new design allows to keep the fan speeds lower while allowing the heat to dissipate evenly throughout the card.

 

 

• Greater Design Flexibility

• Better looking

• Aluminum material is light weight and cooler

• Greater Airflow

 

Double Dissipation -> The Double-D Dual Fan whether over heat-pipes or HydroCell offers up to 3x more air flow giving you up to 13dB quieter & 7°C cooler

 

 

 

• Slower Fan Speeds give you Up to 13dB Quieter

• Great airflow coverage give you Up to 7°C Cooler

• Directly cools heatsink, components and PCB

• Overheated components and PCB can also reduce performance

 

Solid Capacitors -> Solid Capacitors are more durable than Electrolytic Capacitors so they are designed last longer and withstand more heat.

 

 

 

• 40,000 more hours of operation than electrolytic

capacitors.

• Designed to withstand up to 105°C, and won’t

explode.

 

Dust Free Fans -> XFX graphics cards use IP-5X fans which offer the highest level of protection against dust and other foreign objects that can reduce the performance of fans overtime.

 

 

 

• Dust protected

• Ingress of dust is not entirely prevented, but it

must not enter in sufficient quantity to interfere

with the satisfactory operation of the equipment;

complete protection against contact

 

XFX Bracket Design -> Exclusive XFX Bracket design can lower your cards temperature by up to 20% by increasing airflow by up to 200%. This allows it to achieve better overclocking.

 

 

 

• Up to 20% Lower Temperatures

• Up to 200% (2X) Airflow

• Better Overclocking

 

The XFX fans are designed to use linear fan speed ramping controls so that fan speeds and temperatures are optimized to reduce excess noise:

 

 

 

• Generally quieter compared to traditional cards

• No excess fan speeds

• No over or under-cooling

 

 

The XFX Radeon HD 7770 Black Super Overclocked Edition is shipped inside a cardboard enclosure with nice box art; on the frontal side of the packaging, we get to see that this product features a “Double Dissipation” cooling system, that it is a GHz Edition product, meaning the GPU clocks are over the 1000MHz mark, along with the total memory quantity and PCI-E version:

 

 

 

The Radeon HD 7770 key features are full listed on one of the sides:

 

 

 

On the same side, for sorting purposes, we get to see a sticker with the product code and serial numbers:

 

 

 

The other sides give us information about the XFX card highlights, concerning both hardware and software:

 

 

The box is fully sealed on both sides, for additional protection:

 

 

Inside the external packaging, we can find a second black cardboard box, with the XFX logo and the respective website on top:

 

 

Opening it reveals the documentation and we can see right away that it has multiple layers:

 

 

Along with the well known “Do not Disturb” door hanger XFX uses to put inside the boxes, we can also find a Driver/CD Install Guide, the actual CD with drivers, a small leaflet describing the PSU line from XFX, a warranty card, a second small leaflet with additional accessories and a Quick Install Guide:

 

 

On the back of the door hanger, we can get the necessary registration instructions and here we can also write down our user name and password that we will get after the process is completed:

 

 

The drivers are located on a separate disk, but we can always download the latest version from the AMD website:

 

 

 

The XFX Driver/CD Install Guide shows us what steps we need to perform for proceeding with the software installation:

 

 

 

XFX has available a lot of accessories concerning the VGA department, so here we can find adapters, low profile kits, a stand for multiple monitors and so on:

 

 

 

The other guide explains us step by step the procedures for installing the card inside our computer:

 

 

 

A small enclosure inside the cardboard box also contains hardware accessories, like a DVI to VGA adapter, a Crossfire bridge, one Mini-DP to DP adapter and a small black envelope:

 

 

 

The previously mentioned envelope contains a case badge which features the Black Edition inscription:

 

 

 

By removing the top side of the box, we can reveal the card fully wrapped inside an anti-static bag:

 

 

 

The top metallic plate is fully covered with a transparent plastic film, which needs to be removed before using the card for the first time:

 

 

 

XFX 7770 Black SOE features a dual fan cooling system and the top is covered with a metallic plate; in the center there is the XFX logo:

 

 

 

Each fan has 11 blades and is screwed onto a metallic frame that is linked to the top shroud:

 

 

 

If we have a case with a lateral window, the name of the card can be easily read thanks to the inscriptions on the side of the cover:

 

 

 

 

 

The two fans are blowing cold air onto the radiator which covers most of the card surface, for cooling the copper plate:

 

 

 

The Radeon HD 7770 features only one 6-pin PCI-E power connector:

 

 

 

The opposite side contains a cable splitter, which is used to power both fans from the same header on the PCB:

 

 

 

On the back side we can find the matte black PCB with a lot of holes unused, left from the original design:

 

 

 

Two of the screws that hold the cooling system fixed onto the GPU are covered with warranty stickers:

 

 

 

An additional sticker with the product code name and serial number can be found here:

 

 

 

The Radeon HD 7770 comes only with one Crossfire finger, which means that we can use a maximum of two cards:

 

 

 

The metallic plate features a design which helps evacuate hot air better ; here we also have the DVI connector, one HDMI and two Mini-DP:

 

 

 

Stefan's Test Setup
CPU	Core i7 920 @ 3.2Ghz
Cooling	Cogage True Spirit
Mainboard	Asrock X58 Extreme
Memory	G.Skill F3-12800CL8T-6GBPI PI Series
VGA	AXLE GeForce 210 512MB DDR2 Gainward Geforce GTS 250 Deep Green Gainward Geforce GT240 Inno3D Geforce GT240 Sparkle Geforce GTS 250 LP ATI Radeon HD 4550 ATI Radeon HD 4890 ATI Radeon HD 5770 ATI Radeon HD 5830 ATI Radeon HD 5450 ATI Radeon HD 5670 Sparkle Geforce GTX 470 Inno3D GeForce GTS 250 iChill Palit GeForce GTS 450 Low Profile Sparkle Calibre X460G ECS Geforce GTX 460 Black Sparkle Calibre X580  Sparkle Calibre X560DF XFX Radeon HD 7770 Black SOE DD
Other	Power Supply : Antec True Power New 750W HDD : Seagate Barracuda 320GB 7200.10 Case : Cooler Master HAF922 Case with 2 NB-Multiframe S-Series MF12-S3HS@1800RPM on the side

With the help of the GPU-Z 0.5.9 utility, we could extract lots of information regarding the video card clocks,memory type, pixel and texture fill rate and so on:

 

For digging out even more information, we have used the AIDA64 utility:

 

Here are the CAL capabilities of the XFX 7770 Black SOE DD:

Temperature tests:

To find out the IDLE and maximum temperatures, I have used the Furmark utility, and let it run for about 15 minutes in the Xtreme Burning Mode. To record the temperatures, the GPU-Z utility was used, thanks to its Sensors monitoring tab. The recorded room temperature at the time of testing was 19.9 degrees Celsius:

IDLE

Full Load

 

Noise measurements

Before finding out the noise the video card was producing, I have first measured the noise inside the room the tests took place and I found out it was 26.4dBA (with everything turned off).

The next step was to measure the noise the test system was producing, without the video card installed; the value I have obtained was 32.2dBA. Most of the fans inside the case were turned off, but the CPU (43%) and chipset one (30%).

At all times, the sound meter was placed 8cm under the video card.

The GPU fan was controlled by the Catalyst Control Center application:

 

Noise and RPM Reading and different fan speeds

 

 

The 3DMark Vantage scores were calculated by summing up the GPU and CPU subscores.

Here are the Vantage subscores separately:

 

We first converted the obtained scores/FPS for each benchmark to a percentage in comparison to the highest score (=100%), we then averaged all the benchmark scores per resolution/IQ and the results are put into these charts. So these are relative performance charts in % to the fastest card. (full performance numbers here)

 

We first converted the obtained scores/FPS for each benchmark to a percentage in comparison to the highest score (=100%), we then averaged all the benchmark scores per resolution/IQ and the results are put into these charts. So these are relative performance charts in % to the fastest card. (full performance numbers here)

 

The Radeon HD 7770 is meant to be an upgrade for the 5770 (or the rebadged version, 6770), and succeeds to beat it in each and every benchmark; however, there are some offerings on the market the 7770 goes head to head with like the 6850, which is cheaper and offers a little more performance.

 

While we cannot recommend for now the stock clocked 7770, with the XFX 7770 Black Super Overclocked Edition, we have another story: even if the product is priced higher than the reference model, we have a dual fan cooling system, which is, besides quiet, light thanks to the aluminum build, efficient enough and a high overclock from factory at both GPU and memory.

 

Thanks to the 28nm architecture, the power consumption is lower compared to the previous generation. The fans are specially designed so the dust accumulation during usage does not damage the bearings and the lifespan is increased by up to 10000 hours.

 

The ZeroCore Power feature the new GPUs from AMD have is very useful because of two things: first we have power consumption with is almost non-existent when the GPU is in long idle mode. Secondly there is the noise, which also completely disappears during this state, because the fans are turned off:

 

 

 

This feature makes the card ideal to install in systems that we leave overnight for downloading purposes or other activities that do not imply using the GPU.

 

Considering how good the new Radeon HD series scale in Crossfire, pairing two of these may result in having very good overall performance, even succeeding to defeat the GTX 580, the current high end single GPU card from Nvidia.

 

The XFX Radeon 7770 SOE sample could be further overclocked to 1160MHz GPU and 1350Mhz Memory, without any extra voltage increase from Catalyst Control Center.Here are the performance gains in 3DMark 11:

 

 

The Radeon HD 7770 Black Super Overclocked Edition MSRP at the moment of the review is $179.

 

XFX Radeon HD 7770 Black Super Overclocked Edition Double Dissipation Recommended For:

 

 

I would like to thank again to XFX for making this review possible!