ASUS Takes Liberties with Its AMD Radeon HD 7770 Card

Since Advanced Micro Devices has finally made the official introduction of the Radeon HD 7770 video controller, its partners, in this case ASUS, are taking their turns as well.

ASUS has prepared both HD 7770 and 7750 cards, but we will focus on the former here and leave the second one for later.

The card went through a transformation, both in terms of design and performance.

This is owed to the fact that AMD did not prohibit its OEMs from coming up with their own custom designs.

Previously, the GPU developer would impose a period of time after launch, during which its partners had to stick to the reference PCB and cooler. Only after several weeks, or months, were they allowed to start taking liberties.

As already mentioned, this is not the case here, so ASUS wasted no time in launching the Radeon HD 7770 DirectCU TOP.

The DirectCU cooler has been used on various other, upper-mid range graphics adapters, so this is not too great a surprise.

For those who need a reminder, the DirectCU has a number of heatpipes that make direct contact with the GPU die and send the heat to an aluminum fin array.

That said, the improved cooling capabilities allowed ASUS to push the clock even higher than they already were.

While the Cape Verde GPU already functioned at 1 GHz, the Radeon HD 7770 DirectCU pushed that clock to 1.125 GHz. On that same note, the 1 GB of GDDR5 memory operates at a frequency of 4.6 GHz instead of 4.5 GHz.

The rest of the specs are unchanged from the stock ones, so interested consumers may as well go here and get better acquainted with everything (connectors, ROPs, memory bandwidth, etc.).

ASUS will probably stick to the same $159/ 120.71 Euro price point as everyone else.

Posted in: Hardware, Preview