Verdict and Conclusion
The Gigabyte HD 7770 OC is an exciting card, it is the first affordable 28nm GPU on the market and also one of the first GPUs to have stock clock speeds over (well over!) 1GHz.
The price is a bit high for its performance, though that is offset by it’s very low heat production.
Said performance is plenty for most games at what passes for a medium resolution these days, even at maximum settings. If you turn the settings down a bit from Ultra I’m sure it will run a 1080p display in most games without issue.
The fan is very quiet indeed, very nice.
Despite the quiet fan, temps were excellent at all times. This thing just doesn’t produce much heat!
Speaking of heat, the TDP (worst case power consumption) is a mere 80w. To put that in perspective the HD 6850 (which the 7770 OC beats by and large) uses 127w and the GTX560 (which is slightly faster in most benchmarks) uses a whopping 150w, almost twice the power consumption!
I had no issues at all with the drivers, a quick trip to AMD.com for the newest drivers and I was up and running in no time.
The lack of overclocking room means that gigabyte did a good job matching the voltage and the core clocks, unfortunately it does mean that there is limited fun to be had in overclocking if you aren’t willing to take a soldering iron to the card for more voltage. I’m hoping that Gigabyte will release a software voltage tool for the card at some point in the future.
To summarize, there are plenty of pros:
- Solid gaming performance.
- Very low noise.
- Very low power consumption.
- Factory overclock is well tuned.
- Core clock gives great bragging rights.
As always, there are some cons too.
- Very limited overclocking headroom.
- No voltage control.
- Not the fastest card in its price range (though it is the best performance/watt).
All told this is a fantastic card for performance/watt and a decent card for performance/dollar. The combination of the two plus the very quiet operation lead to a final rating of 8.8/10 and a Recommended badge.
SCORE
8.8/10
