Sapphire HD 7770 Vapor-X Ghz Edition unboxing.

[Cyberburnout]

This is the wonderful prize I won in week 2 of the Summer Giveaway Sponsored by Sapphire Technology! Wanted to share with everyone. Thanks Sapphire Technology and Pure OC for this awesome GPU.

As you see Sapphire does a great job of applying art work to their boxes. On this one we have the dangerous arctic hunter woman. I'm guessing this is to portray a the cooling of Vapor-X system applied to the HD 7770. Very nice.



Very nice packaging. Card was surrounded in a thick bubble ESD bag and positioned down in the preformed card board box insert. This gives it a safe distance from the top of the box in case there is an impact during shipping.




Sapphire was nice enough to provide a 4 pin molex to PCIe 6pin adaptor, Dvi to VGA connector and a 1.8 meter HDMI extension cable. The card was covered in a clear plastic cover to provide additional protection from scratches. Very nice looking card.



here you can see the great design on the Vapor-X cooling system and GPU cover. This card has a bit of weight to it due to the heat sink and dual heat pipes covered with two 80mm fans. The card feels solid in your hand unlike the 4870 I'm currently using. It is powered with a single 6 pin PCIe connector.



The best part after the cooling solution is connection options. 1 x Dual-Link DVI, 1 x HDMI 1.4a, 1 x DisplayPort 1.2, 1 x Single-Link DVI-D. These are full size HDMI and Display ports unlike some of the other cards we have seen. No additional adaptors needed or wanted in this case. The HD 7770 Vapor-X is capable of Eyefinity 2.0 and Crossfire 2-way. Meaning you can only add 1 additonal HD 7770.



That concludes my un-boxing of the Sapphire HD 7770 Vapor-X Ghz Edition GPU. I will be attempting my first build log featuring this GPU once I obtain a new case.

Again I would like the thank Sapphire Technology and Pure OC for putting together the best giveaway around.

[killjoyjim]

Verry nice. Injoy it.

[Cyberburnout]

Verry nice. Injoy it.

I sure will! For now I need to go lay down again. lol

[Doctor_Death]

Glad you received your card on time, and that your happy with it, let us know how things turn out once you have it installed

[Cyberburnout]

Glad you received your card on time, and that your happy with it, let us know how things turn out once you have it installed

I sure will. I couldn't wait. I'm installing it now!

[Drdeath]

We want benchmarks!

[Cyberburnout]

We want benchmarks!

Going to shot you a PM real quick.

[Cyberburnout]

Sorry for the delay in posting benchmarks. My pc and I have been fighting again. Now that is straightened out I can post some numbers.

I am upgrading from my ever faithful HIS HD4870. It has served its purpose for years with honors but now it is time for some newer features, lower temps, lower power consumption and less fan noise. Before I removed the HD4870 I ran 2 quick benchmarks so Ill have some kind of base to compare the HD7770 Vapor-X. Neither of these GPUs will be used to break benchmarking records or used to power six LCDs in some fancy array of video ecstasy, so I didn't try to. The HD 7770 Vapor-X is a solid entry level middle of the road gaming GPU that has an option of powering up to 3 LCDs. I don't see this being likely in most cases, so i used one at normal resolutions that entry level gamers will play.

Heaven- Settings
RES: 1366x768
Shaders: High
Textures: High
Filter: Trilinear
Anisotropy: 4x
Occlusion: enabled
Refraction: enable

HIS HD 4870
FPS: 58.8...........MIN FPS: 33.2
Score: 1482....... MAX FPS:107.8

Sapphire HD 7770 Vapor-X
FPS:77.2 ......... MIN FPS: 40.3
Score: 1945...... MAX FPS: 146.1


Those are pretty substantial increases in all categories. Even with the decrease in memory bus (4870 256 bit vs HD7770 128 bit) the clock speeds and memory speeds makes up for the decrease with faster fill rates. A clear win for the HD 7770 Vapor-x.

Cinebench OpenGL At default settings.

HIS HD 4870
Score: 58.11

Sappire HD 7770 Vapor-X
Score: 69.29

Another clear win for the Vapor-X. The OpenGl Cinebench test suppose to be a gpu related benchmark but it still relies on your cpu for overhead. I found that out the hard way. After i removed the AMD CC software to perform a clean install of the HD 7770 I forgot to set my CPU OC back to were it was. I was confused to why the HD 7770 only scored 55.27. I thought I got a new card and went backwards in performance. Once I reset my CPU OC (3.8ghz) to the same as when i ran the HD 4870 the HD7770 was able to easily beat the older card with the wider memory bus and more SPUs.

Since I had a base and knew it would no longer be a competition between the two cards I gave the HD4870 a farewell and boxed it up in its original packaging to await its fate. TBD. Now its time to play with the HD7770 Vapor-X solo!

I started with a standard in GPU benchmarking, 3DMark 11 using performance settings. Surprisingly it scored higher then some of the reviews I have read. Scoring a P3643. Not bad at all.
[IMG][/IMG]

Next Up on the menu is another regular for determining if your system can play any game outside of Angry Birds, Tom Clancy's Hawks.

Settings
1280x720
Terrain Tessellation: OFF...........Enviroment: HIGH
AA: 4X....................................Texture Quality: HIGH
Vsync: ON...............................Post Processing: ON
Full Screen: ON........................Depth of Field: ON
View Distance: ON....................Shadows: OFF



MAX FPS: 80 FPS
Average FPS: 59 FPS:

Looked outstanding. Smooth with no hiccups. I have never played this game but it looked so good during the benchmark I might have to pick it up. Play it on my 55" LCD.

I ran HAWKs again with a slightly higher resolution just for the fun of it. 1366x768. The HD 7770 vapor-X didnt break a sweat. It lost a single FPS at the higher res. Very nice.

MAX FPS: 79 FPS
AVERAGE FPS: 59 FPS

I was curious to see how my system compared to others running similar specs and using a HD7770. I used PerformanceTest 7.0 to run a series of test but since this is only about the GPU I didnt show it. I filtered comparisons by first, Units with the HD7770 then by units that had specs, right below, right around and right above mine.



My System is the purple line in the middle. Not bad at all. However keep in mind that I was using an OC of 3.8ghz and some of those are surely stock speeds. Still makes my 965BE look good next to a 17-3930k.




Running benchmarks is a lot of fun but I guess you have to have some kind of serious material afterwards. That brings me to a few questions about the HD 7770 Vapor-X and the software called Trixx.

Question 1. I ran countless benchmarks to make sure all of the data I presented was correct. During all of this stress i put on the Vapor-X The fan never increased in speed. NOT ONCE! Trixx reports the idle temp at 36c and under stress it went up to 49c. The Fan set on automatic stayed at 20%. Either the Vapor Chamber is truly that awesome or something is not correct and it doesn't auto adjust properly. If anyone has information on this please share.

Question 2. I was going to attempt to overclock the HD 7770 Vapor-X a little more and run some more benchmarks. This was not possible for me. If i changed the GPU clock or memory clock i would receive a AMD Radeon driver failed error. It would freeze whatever I was doing for a minute or so then restart the driver. I made sure I have the newest version of Trixx with no change. All I was able to adjust was fan speed. If anyone has any tips on this please share.

Overall I am very very happy with this upgrade over my aging dinosaur, the HD4870. Its quieter, faster, feature stacked, doesn't require a small power plant to fuel it, A single 6 pin PCI-e is all that is needed and not least of all a lot cooler. The older HD 4870 idled in the 50c area. I haven't been able to get the Vapor-X to reach 50c yet.

A great GPU to hope into desktop PC gaming without breaking the bank. Thanks Pure OC and Sapphire Technologies for providing me this very nice upgrade.

Sandy Bruce AKA Cyberburnout.

[killjoyjim]

Nice.

[Cyberburnout]

Thanks jim!

[Bob2701]

Congrats again on your win, enjoy the new card.