Sapphire Radeon HD 7770 Pictured Ahead of Launch

With just a few more hours to go until the Radeon HD 7770 becomes official, a picture of an upcoming HD 7770 graphics card built by Sapphire has just reached the web giving us a glimpse at the successor of the popular Juniper HD 5770/HD 6770 solutions.

For this next-gen midrange graphics card, Sapphire decided to go with a design similar to the one used for some of its Radeon HD 6770 graphics cards.

This relies on a single large central fan to ventilate both the PCB of the video card, as well as a heatsink that draws the heat away from the GPU via a thick copper heatpipe.

On the connectivity front, things are also surprisingly familiar as Sapphire’s creation sports the usual 3 display output configuration which comprises DVI, HDMI and mini-DisplayPort outputs.

Sadly, OBR-Hardware, the website behind this picture, hasn’t revealed the operating clocks of the Sapphire card, but judging by the cooler installed we would say this sticks to AMD’s reference frequencies.

In the case of the HD 7770, these are set at 1000MHz for the GPU, while the memory works at 1,125MHz (4.5GHz in data rate mode).

At the heart of the Radeon HD 7770 video card stands the Cape Verde XT GPU, which is based on the same Graphics Core Next (GCN) architecture as the more powerful HD 7900-series graphics cores.

Specs wise, the core features 640 streaming processors, 40 texture units and 16 ROP units, all installed together with a 128-bit wide memory bus that is connected to 1GB of GDDR5 video buffer.

AMD’s Radeon HD 7700-series graphics cards are expected to be made official on February 15, but at this point in time their pricing is still unknown.

Posted in: Hardware, Preview