First Radeon HD 7700 Card with Overvoltage Support and TransThermal Design

Taiwanese mainboard manufacturer MSI, also known for its powerful notebooks and video cards, has recently announced the R7770 Power Edition 1GD5/OC video card, on its official website. This is a unique model with special cooling and overclocking features.

MSI’s new Radeon HD 7770 video card comes with a very special cooling system. It has two fans that can slide back and forth on the cooling heat sink, and that can be removed when the card is not in high overclocking mode. This way, MSI’s R7770 Power Edition 1GD5/OC video card will be quieter and the unnecessary cooling fan can sit tight in the box and doesn’t get worn out. Also, one of the fans can be stacked over the other to increase the airflow in a certain area of the heatsink. This cooling design is called by MSI “TransThermal” cooling and we think it’s a good idea.

The card features AMD’s “Cape Verde” GPU. This chip comes with a minuscule 123 square millimeter die size, containing 1.5 billion transistors. The default GPU frequency is 1 GHz when working in 3D mode, but MSI’s implementation comes pre-overclocked to 1100 MHz GPU speed. The “Cape Verde XT” GPU is part of AMD’s GCN architecture and comes with much improved GPU compute performance. The GPU has 640 unified shader processors, 40 texturing units and 16 ROPs.

This is not the highest factory overclock we’ve seen on a Radeon HD 7770 card, as HiS’ Radeon HD 7770 IceQX is clocked directly at 1170 MHz, as we reported here. Sapphire’s HD 7770 Vapor-X OC Edition video card is pre-overclocked at the same 1100 MHz, documented here. On the other hand, MSI’s R7770 Power Edition 1GD5/OC video card comes with factory overvoltage support that will allow the user to adjust the voltage of GPU, memory and VDDCI to unleash the potential of the graphics card.

The card also comes fitted with high-quality and reliable electronic components marketed by MSI under the moniker “Military Class III Components.” These are certified to meet MIL-STD-810G standard, thus ensuring the best stability and quality. The rest of the components are Hi-c CAP, SFC and All Solid capacitors. The overvoltage and overclocking will be handled by MSI well-known “Afterburner” overclocking utility.

The graphics memory works at the default 4500 MHz, which is quite a pity, considering that the card has a 128 Bit memory BUS. On the connectivity side, MSI’s R7770 Power Edition 1GD5/OC video card comes with one DVI-I connector, a HDMI 1.4a interface along with a Display Port. HDMI 1.4a also brings 120 MHz stereoscopic 3D support along with 4K display ability and 3 GHz HDMI. Pricing has not been made official yet, but we estimate it to be around 200 USD (~ 160 EUR) at the day of the launch.

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