Introduction

During my hospital stay last month we saw the AMD Radeon HD 7700 series launch and while most the time we would look at the reference card and then follow them up with partner cards, because the launch happened while I was away, when I got out we wanted to quickly work through the partner cards we had on offer.

First we checked out the XFX offering which was called the HD 7770 Black Edition S Super Overclocked, then we looked at the Sapphire card and discovered it carried with it a similar strong overclock and we tested the new model in CrossFire.

From there we moved away from the HD 7770 and looked at the HIS HD 7750 1GB to see how the new HD 7700 series was rounded out. If that wasn't enough of the new HD 7700 series we also checked out the dual fan MSI HD 7770 and proceeded to see how high we could overclock the model. After all that was done and I found myself looking at the reference HD 7770 we have here today from AMD. I realized that we actually haven't looked at reference clock performance of the new model.

So saying that, it's exactly what we're going to look at today. While a lot of companies are offering strongly overclocked models out of the box, we're also seeing a lot of companies just offer the stock 1GHz core clock. Being a reference card, though, that means we're not dealing with any kind of package. Instead we'll take a quick look at the card and the default specifications before we look at the test system setup and of course the performance.