XFX & Sapphire Radeon HD 7770 Review - PAGE 16

While the total performance of the HD 7770 is not what we initially anticipated it to be, both Sapphire and XFX did an excellent job fine-tuning their respective products, thus allowing them to improve the performance, thermal efficiency and acoustics in comparison to the reference design. The Sapphire model was the marginally faster card of the two, due to a 30MHz higher clock than the XFX model. However, the difference was never higher than a single frame, and as the resolution was increased the cards leveled out and both performed at exactly the same level. So, in terms of out-of-the-box performance, both graphics cards get the job done at similar levels.

Both of the graphics cards were also extremely quiet, and in fact they were able to effortlessly maintain a GPU load temperature below 65°C and still remain quieter than the stock fans in my Corsair 600T case. This is due to the Cape Verde XT graphics processor being an extremely small 123mm² die that only requires 80 watts of power to run at speeds of up to a 1GHz. Additionally, the robust design of the thermal solutions played a huge part in efficiency, as both Sapphire and XFX utilized robust thermal solutions through different designs.

When it came to overclocking, the XFX model had a slight advantage as it capped out ahead of the Sapphire model, but both graphics cards were really within a small margin of each other. They also only managed to scale slightly higher than the reference AMD board we tested, so we can conclude that most Cape Verde XT graphics cards will top out around 1270MHz (at 1350mV), with the few exceptional cores having a higher ceiling of around 1300MHz. The memory on the other hand scaled much higher than the reference board, as both were able to nearly reach a clock speed of 1400MHz (5600Gbps effective).

Between the two cards, both get the job done nicely and really push the core to it's threshold So, if you were expecting a clear winner between the two, we're afraid we have to call this match up a tie. Turning to prices though, Sapphire has gone with a lower MSRP of $159, while the XFX Black Edition costs up to $179 USD.