Sapphire HD7770 GHZ FleX Edition Review

We have reviewed all of Sapphire's Flex cards to date and today we are looking at the latest, budget addition in their range, the HD7770 Flex GHZ Edition. Sapphire are shipping this card with a custom low noise cooling solution and we aim to find out if this is a high value for money, low cost solution for a gamer and workstation user on a strict budget. Sapphire have been very active this year, releasing a slew of performance cards such as the HD7970 6GB Toxic Edition and HD7950 Vapor X Edition, in the high end. They also recently released the HD7750 Low Profile card, which I adopted to use in my space restricted media center system, downstairs. It would be fair to say that regardless of your budget, Sapphire have an AMD card to suit. The ability to support three DVI monitors in Eyefinity mode and deliver a true Single Large Surface work area without the need for active adapters will prove invaluable for many people. Not only for gamers, but the audience who need multiple, accelerated displays for work oriented tasks, such as 3D rendering, photographic manipulation and video encoding. Product Sapphire HD7870 FleX Edition Sapphire HD7770 GHZ FleX Edition AMD HD7870 AMD HD7850 Core Clock speed 1050mhz 1000mhz 1000mhz 860mhz Transistors 2.8B 1.5B 2.8B 2.8B Stream Processors 1,280 640 1,280 1,024 Compute Performance 2.56 TFLOPS 1.28 TFLOPS 2.56 TFLOPS 1.76 TFLOPS Texture Units 80 40 80 64 Texture Fillrate 80 GT/s 40 GT/s 80 GT/s 55.0 GT/s ROPs 32 16 32 32 Pixel Fillrate 32.0 GP/s 16 GP/s 32.0 GP/s 27.52 GP/s Z/Stencil 128 64 128 128 Memory Type 2GB GDDR5 1GB GDDR5 2GB GDDR5 2GB GDDR5 Memory Clock 1,250mhz 1,125mhz 1,200mhz 1,200mhz Memory Data Rate 5.0 Gbps 4.5 Gbps 4.8 Gbps 4.8 Gbps Memory Bandwidth 153.6 GB/s 72 GB/s 153.6 GB/s 153.6 GB/s The Sapphire HD7770 FleX Edition is configured to AMD HD7770 GHZ reference clock speeds. The core speed is therefore set to 1,000mhz and the memory speed at 1,125mhz (4.5 Gbps effective). Here she is again, the famous, well endowed 'Sapphire' army lass, looking equally moody and fierce with a barbed wire tattoo on her arm. That would normally be enough to get the young geeks salivating at the mouth. For a budget oriented card this bundle is actually quite impressive. Sapphire have bundled a high grade HDMI cable, various power and video converter cables, a software disc, and a quick start guide. The Sapphire HD7770 Flex Edition is built on a bright blue PCB with a black plastic cooler covering the full length. In the center is a single, large fan with the FleX branding on both shroud and cooler. The card is Crossfire capable in a two way configuration only. If you want three or Quad Crossfire configurations you are expected to buy a HD79xx series card. Power is supplied from a single 6 pin PCI power connector. This is a dual slot design with two DVI connectors and a single full sized HDMI and DisplayPort. It is Eyefinity capable and can power up to 6 displays. This solution can simultaneously output multiple, independent audio streams from the HDMI and mini Displayport connectors at the rear of the card. The GPU can support 3GHz HDMI with frame packing support for Stereo 3D. Sapphire have adopted a simple heatsink which is based around two thick copper heatpipes which run into separate racks of aluminum fins on either side of the base. They are using high quality ELPIDA GDDR5 memory for this card. An overview of the hardware via GPUz. The Cape Verde core is built around the 28nm manufacturing process, with a core clock of 1,000mhz. The 1GB of GDDR5 memory is connected via a 128 bit memory interface. The card is equipped with 16 ROPS and 640 unified shaders. This is no powerhouse gaming card, but should cope with many titles at 1080p. On this page we present some super high resolution images of the product taken with the 24.5MP Nikon D3X camera and 24-70mm ED lens. These will take much longer to open due to the dimensions, especially on slower connections. If you use these pictures on another site or publication, please credit Kitguru.net as the owner/source. You can right click and ‘save as’ to your computer to view later. To test today we are using our long standing Core i7 970 system, which is overclocked. We have a variety of hardware benchmarked on this system this year which will make for an interesting market comparison. We would normally test a FleX Solution with a selection of games across 3 screens. The HD7770 however is not designed to handle modern gaming engines at 5760x1080 resolution, so we will be omitting this from the review today. It is an ideal solution however for a workstation with multiple screens. Main Test System: Processor: Core i7 970 @ 4.6ghz Graphics: Sapphire HD7770 GHZ FleX Edition Cooling: Coolit Vantage Motherboard: MSI X58A-GD65 Chassis: Thermaltake Level 10 Power Supply: Corsair AX1200 Memory: 6GB ADATA @ 2133mhz 9-10-9-32 Storage: Kingston SSDNow V+ 512GB Gen 2 SSD (Storage) / Crucial RealSSD C300 256GB (OS boot) Monitor: Dell U3011. Comparison Cards: KFA2 GTX680 LTD OC Asus GTX680 Asus GTX670 Direct CU II TOP Gigabyte GTX 660 Ti OC Windforce MSI GTX 660 OC Edition Twin Frozr Sparkle GTX650 OC Dragon Series Sapphire HD7970 6GB Toxic Edition HD7970 GHZ Edition HD7970 Sapphire HD7950 Vapor-X Edition (@950mhz core clock) HD7950 Sapphire HD7870 Overclock Edition HD7870 HD7850 HD6990 (880 core) HD6970 HD6950 HD6870 Sapphire HD7770 Vapor X Overclock Edition XFX HD7770 Black Edition S CFx HD7770 CFx HD7770 Sapphire HD7750 Ultimate Edition HD6790 HD6770 HD6670 GTX590 SLi GTX590 GTX580 SLi GTX580 GTX570 Software: Windows 7 Enterprise 64 bit Unigine Heaven Benchmark 3DMark Vantage 3DMark 11 Fraps Professional Steam Client FurMark Games: Alien V Predator Tom Clancy HAWX 2 Resident Evil 5 Far Cry 2 F1 2011 Total War: Shogun 2 Battlefield 3 Elder Scrolls V: SkyRim All the latest BIOS updates and drivers are used during testing. We perform generally under real world conditions, meaning KitGuru tests games across five closely matched runs and then average out the results to get an accurate median figure. If we use scripted benchmarks, they are mentioned on the relevant page. Some game descriptions are edited from Wikipedia. Most graphics cards based on AMD technology require the third monitor in an Eyefinity set-up to be a DisplayPort monitor, or connected with an active DisplayPort Adapter. The SAPPHIRE FleX family can support three DVI monitors in Eyefinity mode and deliver a true SLS (Single Large Surface) work area without the need for active adapters. The first two monitors are connected to the two DVI ports and the third to an HDMI to DVI cable (supplied) with no extra hardware required. Catalyst Control Center is easy to use and all the settings for an Eyefinity system are clearly marked in the ‘AMD Eyefinity Multi Display’ panel. The image above shows a 30 inch screen in the central position, and two 24 inch screens on either side, with one rotated into portrait mode. This is how I configure my main work system. The next process is to configure the screens in the way you want them. Above, we are running three 24 inch screens side by side in landscape mode. It is perfectly possible that Catalyst Control Centre may set up your screens ‘out of position’. Meaning the central screen could either be on the left or right. There is a simple process to correct this, by simply clicking on the corresponding blue screen. The later versions of Catalyst Control Center add a very useful taskbar option, across all screens or just on the central screen. I use UltraMon, so I tend to ignore this section completely. Custom resolutions can be configured in the last panel in this section of the driver. We would just leave it at the native settings, in this case 5760×1080. The first time, it may be a little daunting to set this up, but it all starts to make sense rather quickly. Unigine provides an interesting way to test hardware. It can be easily adapted to various projects due to its elaborated software design and flexible toolset. A lot of their customers claim that they have never seen such extremely-effective code, which is so easy to understand. Heaven Benchmark is a DirectX 11 GPU benchmark based on advanced Unigine engine from Unigine Corp. It reveals the enchanting magic of floating islands with a tiny village hidden in the cloudy skies. Interactive mode provides emerging experience of exploring the intricate world of steampunk. Efficient and well-architected framework makes Unigine highly scalable: Multiple API (DirectX 9 / DirectX 10 / DirectX 11 / OpenGL) render Cross-platform: MS Windows (XP, Vista, Windows 7) / Linux Full support of 32bit and 64bit systems Multicore CPU support Little / big endian support (ready for game consoles) Powerful C++ API Comprehensive performance profiling system Flexible XML-based data structures We use the following settings: 1920×1080 resolution. Anti Aliasing off. Anisotrophy 4, Tessellation normal. Shaders High. Stereo 3D disabled. API: Direct X 11. The Sapphire HD7770 GHZ FleX Edition averages almost 35 frames per second, which is a great result for such an intensive benchmark at these settings. It outperforms the Sparkle GTX650 OC Dragon Series by around 7 frames per second. Futuremark released 3DMark Vantage, on April 28, 2008. It is a benchmark based upon DirectX 10, and therefore will only run under Windows Vista (Service Pack 1 is stated as a requirement) and Windows 7. This is the first edition where the feature-restricted, free of charge version could not be used any number of times. 1280×1024 resolution was used with performance settings. A good result for the low end Sapphire HD7770 FleX Edition, scoring 13,345 points. 3DMark 11 is designed for testing DirectX 11 hardware running on Windows 7 and Windows Vista the benchmark includes six all new benchmark tests that make extensive use of all the new features in DirectX 11 including tessellation, compute shaders and multi-threading. After running the tests 3DMark gives your system a score with larger numbers indicating better performance. Trusted by gamers worldwide to give accurate and unbiased results, 3DMark 11 is the best way to test DirectX 11 under game-like loads. If you want to learn more about this benchmark, or to buy it yourself, head over to this page. The Sapphire HD7770 GHZ FleX Edition scores 3,540 points, which is ahead of the Sparkle GTX650 OC Dragon Series and the last generation AMD HD6790. The overclocked Sapphire HD7770 Vapor X Edition scores a couple of hundred points more, due to the enhanced clock speeds. HQV Benchmark 2.0 is an updated version of the original tool and it consists of various video clips and test patterns which are designed to evalute motion correction, de-interlacing, decoding, noise reduction, detail enhancement and film cadence detection. There are two versions of the program, standard definition on DVD and high definition on Bluray. As our audience will be concentrating on HD content so will we. This has a total of 39 video tests which is increased from 23 in the original and the scoring is also up from a total of 130 to 210. As hardware and software gets more complicated, the software has been tuned to make sure we can thoroughly maximise our analysis. Read our initial analysis over here Sapphire HD7770 GHZ FleX Edition Dial 4 Dial with static pattern 5 Gray Bars 5 Violin 5 Stadium 2:2 5 Stadium 3:2 5 Horizontal Text Scroll 5 Vertical Text Scroll 5 Transition to 3:2 Lock 5 Transition to 2:2 Lock 0 2:2:2:4 24 FPS DVCAM Video 5 2:3:3:2 24 FPS DVCam Video 5 3:2:3:2:2 24 FOS Vari-Speed 5 5:5 FPS Animation 5 6:4 12 FPS Animation 5 8:7 8 FPS Animation 5 Interlace Chroma Problem (ICP) 5 Chroma Upsampling Error (CUE) 5 Random Noise: Sailboat 5 Random Noise: Flower 5 Random Noise: Sunrise 5 Random Noise: Harbour Night 5 Scrolling Text 5 Roller Coaster 5 Ferris Wheel 5 Bridge Traffic 5 Text Pattern/ Scrolling Text 5 Roller Coaster 5 Ferris Wheel 5 Bridge Traffic 5 Luminance Frequency Bands 5 Chrominance Frequency Bands 5 Vanishing Text 5 Resolution Enhancement 15 Theme Park 5 Driftwood 5 Ferris Wheel 5 Skin Tones 7 Total 196 A score of 196 points is class leading right now, the ideal solution for high definition media playback on a big screen. F1 2011 is the newest Direct X 11 racing game from industry pioneers CodeMasters. The 2011 Formula One season is the 62nd FIA Formula One season. The original calendar consisted of twenty rounds, including the inaugural running of the Indian Grand Prix before the cancellation of the Bahrain Grand Prix. Pirelli returns to the sport as tyre supplier for all teams, taking over from Bridgestone. Red Bull Racing are the reigning Constructor’s Champions. Red Bull Racing’s Sebastian Vettel is the defending Drivers’ Champion, one of five World Champions appearing on the grid. Solid results for such high settings, averaging 40 frames per second, and maintaining a 30>frame rate at all times. Aliens V Predator has proved to be a big seller since the release and Sega have taken the franchise into new territory after taking it from Sierra. AVP is a Direct X 11 supported title and delivers not only advanced shadow rendering but high quality tessellation for the cards on test today. To test the cards we used a 1080p resolution with DX11, Texture Quality Very High, MSAA Samples 1, 16 af, ambient occulsion on, shadow complexity high, motion blur on. We use this with most of our graphics card testing so results are comparable throughout reviews. Alien V Predator is a demanding Direct X 11 title and it can punish lower end hardware at these settings. The Sapphire HD7770 GHZ FleX Edition struggles to maintain smooth frame rates throughout all of our test environment, dropping to 22 frames per second a couple of times. Tom Clancy’s H.A.W.X. 2 is an arcade-style flight action game developed by Ubisoft Romania and published by Ubisoft. After the events of the first game, the H.A.W.X squadron is sent to Middle East, where a high level of violence is being registered, and the appearance of various insurgents leaders in various hotspots. The team also has to investigate the mysterious disappearance of Russian nuclear weapons. The player will be controlling three groups: one American (Hunter), one British (Munro) and one Russian (Sokov), each with its own pilots and supporting characters. There will also be references to other characters in the Tom Clancy universe. We are testing in full DX11 mode with all settings to maximum. Tom Clancy HAWX 2 favours Nvidia hardware and drivers, however we have no problems maintaining smooth frame rates with the HD7770, even at 1080p with high image quality settings. Resident Evil 5, known in Japan as Biohazard 5, is a survival horror third-person shooter video game developed and published by Capcom. The game is the seventh installment in the Resident Evil survival horror series, and was released on March 5, 2009 in Japan and on March 13, 2009 in North America and Europe for the PlayStation 3 and Xbox 360. A Windows version of the game was released on September 15, 2009 in North America, September 17 in Japan and September 18 in Europe. Resident Evil 5 revolves around Chris Redfield and Sheva Alomar as they investigate a terrorist threat in Kijuju, a fictional town in Africa. Within its first three weeks of release, the game sold over 2 million units worldwide and became the best-selling game of the franchise in the United Kingdom. As of December, 2009, Resident Evil 5 has sold 5.3 million copies worldwide since launch, becoming the best selling Resident Evil game ever made. Even at these high settings we didn't experience any performance problems, averaging around 80 frames per second. This is faster than both the HD6790 and Sparkle GTX650 OC Edition. Far Cry 2 (commonly abbreviated as “FC2 or “fc2″) is an open-ended first-person shooter developed by Ubisoft Montreal and published by Ubisoft. It was released on October 21, 2008 in North America and on October 23, 2008 in Europe and Australia. It was made available on Steam on October 22, 2008. Crytek, the developers of the original game, were not involved in the development of Far Cry 2. Ubisoft has marketed Far Cry 2 as the true sequel to Far Cry, though the sequel has very few noticeable similarities to the original game. Instead, it features completely new characters and setting, as well as a new style of gameplay that allows the player greater freedom to explore different African landscapes such as deserts, jungles, and savannas. The game takes place in a modern-day East African nation in a state of anarchy and civil war. The player takes control of a mercenary on a lengthy journey to locate and assassinate “The Jackal,” a notorious arms dealer. Far Cry 2 is still a popular game and the open world environment can be taxing on even the latest hardware available today. Settings: 1920×1200, D3D10, Disable Artificial Intelligence(No), Full Screen, Anti-Aliasing(8x), VSync(No), Overall Quality(Ultra High), Vegetation(Very High), Shading(Ultra High), Terrain(Ultra High), Geometry(Ultra High), Post FX(High), Texture(Ultra High), Shadow(Ultra High), Ambient(High), Hdr(Yes), Bloom(Yes), Fire(Very High), Physics(Very High), RealTrees(Very High). This engine runs well on Nvidia hardware, with Nvidia drivers, and we can see a rare case when the Sparkle GTX650 OC Dragon Series outperforms the Sapphire HD7770 GHZ FleX Edition, by around 6 frames per second. Shogun 2 is set in 16th-century feudal Japan, in the aftermath of the Ōnin War. The country is fractured into rival clans led by local warlords, each fighting for control. The player takes on the role of one of these warlords, with the goal of dominating other factions and claiming his rule over Japan. The standard edition of the game will feature a total of eight factions (plus a ninth faction for the tutorial), each with a unique starting position and different political and military strengths. We use the built in STEAM benchmark with this game, so you can compare directly against your own hardware. An average frame rate of 31 is quite good, although it is worth pointing out that it did drop below the sweet spot of 25 fps a few times. 1080p really does need a £200 graphics card for Shogun 2 to shine at this resolution. If you can tolerate playing this Direct X 11 title at 720p, then the frame rate improves significantly, averaging almost 80 fps. According to EA, Battlefield 3 garnered 3 million pre-orders by the day of its release. It is unknown at present whether these figures are worldwide or just for the US. The pre-order total makes it “the biggest first-person shooter launch in EA history”, according to the publisher. The engine is beautiful on the PC and very demanding of the partnering hardware. Good performance at these settings, averaging 43 frames per second. The tests were performed in a controlled air conditioned room with temperatures maintained at a constant 24c – a comfortable environment for the majority of people reading this. Idle temperatures were measured after sitting at the desktop for 30 minutes. Load measurements were acquired by playing Crysis 2 for 30 minutes and measuring the peak temperature. We also have included Furmark results, recording maximum temperatures throughout a 30 minute stress test. All fan settings were left on automatic. Sapphire's cooler handles the HD7770 with ease, peaking below 60c when gaming. We have changed our method of measuring noise levels. We have built a system inside a Lian Li chassis with no case fans and have used a fanless cooler on our CPU. The motherboard is also passively cooled. This gives us a build with almost completely passive cooling and it means we can measure noise of just the graphics card inside the system when we run looped 3dMark tests. Ambient noise in the room is around 20-25dBa. We measure from a distance of around 1 meter from the closed chassis and 4 foot from the ground to mirror a real world situation. Why do this? Well this means we can eliminate secondary noise pollution in the test room and concentrate on only the video card. It also brings us slightly closer to industry standards, such as DIN 45635. KitGuru noise guide 10dBA - Normal Breathing/Rustling Leaves 20-25dBA – Whisper 30dBA - High Quality Computer fan 40dBA - A Bubbling Brook, or a Refridgerator 50dBA - Normal Conversation 60dBA - Laughter 70dBA - Vacuum Cleaner or Hairdryer 80dBA - City Traffic or a Garbage Disposal 90dBA - Motorcycle or Lawnmower 100dBA - MP3 player at maximum output 110dBA - Orchestra 120dBA - Front row rock concert/Jet Engine 130dBA - Threshold of Pain 140dBA - Military Jet takeoff/Gunshot (close range) 160dBA - Instant Perforation of eardrum The cooler performance is exceptional. As the HD7770 GHZ Edition doesn't generate much heat the fan never has to spin that high, varying between 20 percent when idle and 32 percent when loaded with Furmark. This card is basically inaudible at all times, unless you have a passively cooled chassis with no system fans and are gaming in a quiet room. To test power consumption today we are using a Keithley Integra unit and we measure power consumption from the VGA card inputs, not the system wide drain. We measure results while gaming in Crysis 2 and record the results. Power consumption is around 56 watts under gaming load, and this rises to 72 watts when loaded with the synthetic Furmark stress test. To overclock today we are using Sapphire's TriXX software tool, which has worked well for us in the past. The Sapphire HD7770 GHZ FleX Edition ships with a reasonable amount of headroom on both core and memory. We managed around a 10-11% increase on both memory and core clock speeds. Good results. The additional, manual clock increase manages to push the score to almost 4,000 points. Not a huge increase, but enough to generate another 1-2 frames per second in many of the engines we tested today. The Sapphire HD7770 GHZ FleX Edition is targeting not only the enthusiast gamer on a budget, but a workstation user who needs to power three or more screens without spending a fortune on a high powered discrete solution. In this regard, the FleX Edition is a success and worthy of the asking price. If you need to power three non DisplayPort screens and yearn for the legendary AMD image quality then this is surely very tempting indeed. It has been a while since I have looked at a modified HD7770 solution and while I still remain unimpressed with AMD's reference design, the Sapphire FleX Solution is certainly more tempting. There is no doubt that the demanding gaming audience will be looking for a solution with more processing grunt. That said, as we have seen today, the Sapphire HD7770 is capable of powering many games at 1080p, running a little short of shader horsepower when tasked with more demanding Direct X 11 titles, such as Alien V Predator and Shogun 2. Sapphire have not clocked this card any higher than AMD's reference design which is slightly disappointing, especially as we found over 100mhz headroom on the core, and 125mhz from the Elpida GDDR5 memory. It is true that every sample will have different limitations, but a 50mhz boost on the core wouldn't cause a problem and would help push the frame rates a little higher. Sapphire do offer an overclocked version of the HD7770, with a custom cooler and core clock set at 1,150mhz - this is available from Overclockers UK for £101.99 inc vat. Sapphire have also overclocked the memory on this card to 1,250mhz (5GBps effective). While the Sapphire FleX Edition is not supplied overclocked, you do pay extra for the additional multiple screen circuitry. Overclockers UK are selling the card for £107.99 inc vat. If you are working within the confines of a strict budget and want to experience the joys of using three monitors, then you can pick up three good quality 1080p 24 inch screens from Overclockers UK for £131.99 inc vat each. These three screens and the price of the Sapphire HD7770 GHZ Flex Edition combined is still much cheaper than a 30 inch screen, without a graphics card in the mix. The added benefit is that, you can easily add another HD7770 at a later date for Crossfire when funds permit. Pros: Supports three DVI monitors out of the box. almost silent. plenty of overclocking headroom. impressive bundle. Can be Crossfired for more power. Low power consumption. runs cool. Cons: A lot of competition around the £100-£110 price point. lacks horsepower with demanding Direct X 11 games. Kitguru says: A worthy choice for a low cost multi screen system. Work on three screens now, game on one later.