Sapphire HD7770 Vapor X Overclock Edition Review

It has been a while since we revisited the AMD HD7770 and I honestly still feel unimpressed with this specific range of cards. While the hardware is well suited for a performance oriented media center the enthusiast gaming audience will undoubtedly be yearning for something with a little more grunt.

To be fair, Sapphire has taken the HD7770 pretty much as far as we would expect with the Sapphire HD7770 Vapor X Overclock Edition.

The generous 100mhz overclock to 1,100mhz delivers noticeable gains, although the hardware is always going to be performance restricted due to the 128bit memory interface and limited shader count. We still can't comprehend why AMD felt it was a good idea to reduce the shader count from 800 on the HD6770 to 640 on the HD7770. The enhanced clock speeds will only deliver a specific level of improvement as the HD7770 is launching from a lower starting point.

Focusing specifically on the Sapphire HD7770 Vapor X Overclock Edition shows a significant improvement with noise levels … this card is actually one of the quietest actively cooled cards we have tested. This is due to the very clever fan profile, which has a tight 400 rpm modulation between 1,100 rpm and 1,500 rpm.

In the real world this means that the noise emissions only increase slightly between idle and load. It will be totally drowned out by a couple of case fans. The card responds well to overclocking, and we squeezed 1,230mhz from the core before instability would occur. Sadly this didn't translate into a huge real world performance boost due to the limited bandwidth of the hardware.

The Sapphire HD7770 Vapor X Overclock Edition doesn't appear to be on sale just yet, although the similarly specified single fan Sapphire OC Edition is currently being sold for £119.99 inc vat. We would assume the VaporX dual fan version to be closely priced.

The biggest competition today still comes from a last generation card which is sold by Amazon in the United Kingdom. The Sapphire HD6850 is available for £102.89 inc vat via Amazon and this would be our first choice at this price point.

Pros:

• Fantastic cooling performance.
• Almost silent.
• decent ‘out of the box' overclocks.
• More headroom available.

Cons:

• HD7770 isn't a significant improvement on the last generation HD6770.
• Sapphire HD6850 is a better deal.

Kitguru says: A great effort from Sapphire and certainly Worth Buying, but we still feel that AMD need to drop the baseline price of the HD7770.

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