Reviews - MSI Radeon HD 7770 OC CrossFire examination

[HEXUS]

Cape Verde XT to redeem itself in two-card CrossFire?

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[dfour]

Someone will make a 2gig custom model soon im sure. Its not going to overcome the innate fact it isnt as good at should have been especially for the price. The price will hopefully go down and the drivers should get better but I still feel its a bit underwhelming as a new middle range card.

[andyb123]

I'm not sure they will, however it does bode quite well for what the results might be of 7870/50 2GB crossfire

[Terbinator]

I'm sure that the results are worse than what graphs portray as well in terms of minimum FPS.

[CAT-THE-FIFTH]

Is it possible to also measure power consumption in a game where the HD7770 Crossfire setup scaled better too??

[Tarinder]

Is it possible to also measure power consumption in a game where the HD7770 Crossfire setup scaled better too??

The power figures for the two cards were taken from Total War: Shogun 2 rather than Crysis 2. The scaling is practically perfect in TWS 2.

[CAT-THE-FIFTH]

The power figures for the two cards were taken from Total War: Shogun 2 rather than Crysis 2. The scaling is practically perfect in TWS 2.

Thanks for clarifying that - you even mention it in the review!! Oops!

Out of interest,does Hexus intend to review any of the lower end FX CPUs,ie,the FX4100,FX4170 and FX6100?? It would be interesting to see how these perform(with the BD patch applied too) against the Core i3 2100 and Core i3 2120. All these CPUs are within the £90 to £110 range and there seems to be only a few comparisons out there ATM.

[Hicks12]

Now this is what makes anyone who says multicard setups mean that the new generation high end cards (7950/70) are useless because they're beaten easily by it. Ignoring the poor optimised games (we know these will be fixed, maybe not crysis as thats Nvidia solely...f you nvidia) we have extreme performance matching the gtx580 in figures ofc... so really its safe to say that all high end cards regardless of age are useless because cheaper cards WILL outperform them in certain scenarios, the 7950/gtx580 both matched/beaten at some point via a £260 setup (a gtx460 sli setup can be had for £220 and thats solid too) but there are issues with any multicard setup which is the reason why its a decision, if you can live with the cons of it you can grab a silly price vs performance setup!.

I personally cant stand microstutter, hoped i couldnt notice it but no game felt fluent with 2x460s, regardless of being near 99% increase fps all the time! Curious Tarinder, did you guys notice microstutter or the games just not "feeling" better than a single setup?. I would like to also ask if in the future you guys could monitor the minimum fps aswell? it just provides a better context i find since two cards can get a 50fps average but if one dips to <30 often but the rest of the time its over 70fps then it still looks solid even compared to a card that hits that 50 - 55 often and doesnt dip further than 45fps etc.

Good review though

[Terbinator]

Minimums will certainly be lower. A bandwidth and RAM starved card will get caned in most of the benchmarks in terms of minimums.

[Tunnah]

why do these reviews never include the nvidia side SLI for comparison ? it's really annoying ha

[scaryjim]

7770 X2 card anyone? Powercolor, perhaps? Based on the figures from this review, you could make a stock 7770 X2 with a single PCIe power connector, that in most situations would outperform a GTX570. That's kinda scary.

Of course, this combination should also have similar performance, if not slightly lower, than a 7870, which means a 7870 will be roughly equivalent performance to a GTX580. Hope Kepler's good, nv...

[CAT-THE-FIFTH]

I have a feeling the HD7850 will be slightly slower than an HD6950,and the HD7870 will be slightly slower than an HD6970. I suspect there will be OC editions of the HD7870 which are as fast or faster than the HD6970. It seems AMD is following the lead of Nvidia,and are allowing OEMs to produce more expensive higher clocked cards!!

I hope HD7870 2GB is not more expensive than the HD6950 2GB cards as these have barely budged in price since launch. OTH,it wouldn't surprise me if these are priced around £250 at launch,ie, near HD6970 2GB pricing.

I really hope they have not done this otherwise they deserve a kick up the arse from Kepler.

[Apex]

And there was me looking for a upgrade from my 4850..... looks like am going to say pass on this gen of card too.