Stevies Sapphire Vapor-X 7770 review

[Pob255]

Great review stevie

Also great to you still running it on an enermax 425w shows that a good psu is worth it's weight.

[stevie lee]

Does updating your drivers work?

well i did say I wasnt finished with this review just yet

after using this card a helluva lot, on average about 10 hours a day gaming - LOTRO, dawn of war II, Two Worlds II, dragon age, company of heroes, to name a few. i feel its time to give my opinion of whether its still worth it after all the price drops, driver updates, new cards and whatnot.


first things first, heres the stuff thats changed since i was last here.

• completely removed all traces of ATI drivers - the card swapping about first time round, messed it up alot.
• reinstalled drivers - first it was 12.8, then 12.11, this update test was run on 12.11 beta 2
• windows update - octobers and novembers updates are on, not got round to putting decembers on yet.
• hard drives - spent a day or 2 deferagging them this past week, they really needed it, about 150gb fragmented on games drive, 48gb on windows drive.

thats about it, not even dusted it or cleaned it. its still got the crisps i spilt on it from christmas day, and a bit of jelly too.

onto the results. new post i think.

[stevie lee]

Driver update results

I re-ran Unigene heaven, Far Cry 2 and The Witcher 2. with the same settings as mentioned earlier in the review.

LOTRO wasnt rerun because it kinda doesnt work anymore, theres well doumented bugs and memory lweaks since the Rohan update came out and i suffer from all of them. game crashes after 10 minutes, it uses 5.5gb ram after 5 minutes, it only a 32bit game, it should only use 2gb maximum, so its leakier than a sieve that someone shot with a shotgun and then drilled holes in just for fun.

heres all the mudged together results in what i hope is easy to read format.



Witcher 2

all the fpses went up, even the ultra ubersampling one. and again, the MAX! settings but with ubersampling turned off, scored identical to the high settings, so if you want to run in high, you mayaswell turn off ubersampling and run it in ultra settings instead, they both run the same so why not?




not sure whats happened here, the fps has gone down. could be because i installed it to the windows drive (cant remember what drive it was on last time) and the programms running are interfering with it. i'm still on a spinny mechanical drive, no SSD for me, so i suffer from these kinda things

i'll leave these results as is and say that:
if you do want to game on your computer, then get 2 drives, one for windows and one for games, these results show that everything interferes with one another if you try to do 2 things at once.




the higher the settings the more of an increase you get from newer drivers.
not sure how to explain that.
maybe the games are more optimized nowadays, maybe they use more features, you'll just have to go and test yourselves on your own games.

conclusion next, new post again

[stevie lee]

CONCLUSION 2

update your drivers!

that is all









seriously though, if you are still on the ATI 4xxx series or earlier, then 12.6 drivers is as high as you can go, the newer drivers dont support them anymore, so no point updating them. update everything else though, they still get improvements/tweaks and whatnot (which reminds me, ive not uopdated the sound drivers since march )
5xxx series and obove, update everything. catalyst has extra buttons from 12.6 to 12.11.beta11. can turn more things on and off. which can either be a good thing or a recipie for disaster.
go and experiment between using the ATI overide settings or the application settings buttons, see what works best for you.

every computers diffferent, even identical ones run differently, you just have to find what you are happy with on your own computer.


Noise and cooling

what noise? i couldnt hear it. ive left it on overnight a few times and not noticed it was still on, its that quiet. cant tell how noisy it is when under heavy gaming load, the B&W 603s and ASW 600 kinda drown out everything in existence

heat - well its been idling at 28C from an ambient room temp of 16c to 20c (depending if the radiators are on or not) so thats all well and good. the 4870 was around 40c fyi.
load temps - to be honest, i've not checked, too busy actually enjoying the games to waste precious seconds alt-tabbing out to go and have a look. the 4870 got up to 60c, sometimes 65c depending on the game. so i'll guess this gets a bit lower than that.


with the 7770 now being £90 or there about, dropped from £120, then i still say:
if you have a 4 year old or more computer, if you have the ports and a decent enough power supply, if you have a small budget, then instead of getting a new low end computer which will be a compromise for price and power. then just buy this graphics update instead. with over double the fps boost (from a 4870 at least) and other improvements from drivers, youll be happy for a few more years until you can save up properly.


that about it for now....

[Zak33]

he's still happy

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