MSI R7770 Power Edition Review - PAGE 1

The AMD Radeon HD 7770 is a cost effective graphics card designed for the mainstream market. Don’t let this fool you though, as it comes equipped with AMD Graphics Core Next architecture, 640 Streaming Processors and 1GB of GDDR5 memory, allowing it to pack quite a punch when it comes to both compute and gaming performance. Of course it doesn’t offer the same level of performance as the big boys, but it can hold its own when gaming at or below 1080p resolution.

The HD 7770 we are examining in this review comes to us from MSI and is part of their Power Edition series. This graphics card comes with improved features such as higher clock speeds, enhanced power circuitry and a custom thermal solution. The thermal solution that comes with this model has a bit of a twist; instead of simply sporting a single or dual fan design, the MSI R7770 Power Edition (PE) comes with two fans, one of them is separate and optional. This is a unique take on a dual-fan thermal solution, and it allows the user to customize the graphics card to either fit into a small form factor case or deliver the best thermal performance.

The fans can be implemented in a variety configurations. The first is the default position which places the fan at the center of the card. This is best used in cases where space is limited, and even while the second fan is not attached the thermal performance should still be better than the reference cooling design. The dual fan configurations meanwhile allow the secondary fan to be placed at either the front of the heatsink for improved VRM cooling, or on top of the default fan for better airflow through the GPU hot zone.