PowerColor Radeon HD 7770 Graphics Card Now Official

PowerColor, one of AMD’s closest add-in board (AIB) partners, has announced recently the introduction of its own graphics card based on the Radeon HD 7770 design which works at AMD’s recommended 1GHz GPU clock rate.

PowerColor’s graphics card doesn’t seem to differ in any way from AMD’s reference design for the HD 7770, except for the usual company logo placed right on the fan hub. 

That being said, the reference cooler developed by AMD is quite capable, judging by the HD 7770 reviews that have popped up so far, as it manages to chill the card without producing too much noise.

Of course, the 28nm fabrication process used for the Cape Verde GPU also takes some of the credit for this feat, since it enabled AMD to build its core without having to increase the TDP over that of previous generation cards.

Speaking of the Cape Verde GPU, this is based on the same Graphics Core Next (GCN) architecture as the much more powerful HD 7900-series graphics cards.

However, this mainstream GPU comes with just 10 Compute Units to deliver a total of 640 stream processors and 40 texture units.

These are packed together with 16 ROP units, one geometry engine/rasterizer and 512KB of L2 cache, as well as with a 128-bit wide memory bus connected to 1GB of GDDR5 video buffer.

In AMD’s reference design, the HD 7700 graphics core is clocked at 1GHz, while the memory runs at 1.125GHz (4.5GHz effective). These are also the frequencies that PowerColor has decided to use for its graphics card. 

PowerColor hasn’t provided us with any details regarding the price of this Cape Verde XT solution, but AMD’s recommended price for the Radeon HD 7770 is set at $159 (about 121 EUR).

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