Gigabyte Radeon HD 7770 OC Video Card Review

As you can see the two cards are identical other than the fact that the Gigabyte GV-R777OC-1GD has a 100MHz higher core clock for an extra $10. You can likely reach this overclock for free by doing it yourself on the base model, but for those that want to be certain or don’t want to mess with overclocking, the extra money is usually worth it.

Before we look at what Gigabyte has done, we wanted to show you the AMD reference card. The AMD Radeon HD 7770 GHz edition graphics card is a dual-slot solution with a single 80mm cooling fan located directly over the GPU. The PCB on the AMD reference design is black and measures 8.25-inches in length.

Gigabyte went back to the drawing board and had the companies engineers come up with a custom designed Radeon HD 7770 graphics card that is just 7.8125″ in length! Gigabyte left no stone unturned here, as they designed an entirely new Printed Circuit Board (PCB) with Gigabyte Ultra Durable 2 materials and slapped a custom GPU cooler on it for improved cooling. Gigabyte also decided to go with a blue PCB on this card, which is fairly normal for them, but we know many people won’t buy a card due to the PCB color not matching their motherboard. The plastic fan shroud doesn’t look bad, but the ends aren’t supported, so it feels flimsy and cheap when you handle the card.

The back of the Gigabyte GV-R777OC-1GD is open as the reference card doesn’t feature a back plate or anything that needs to be talked about. We measured and found that Gigabyte is using standard 43mm mounting holes, so if you plan on changing the GPU cooler or adding a water block at a later date you can and this is the dimension you need to be concerned with.

All of the AMD Radeon 7770 derived cards are based on the ‘Cape Verde’ GPU and that core can only support one CrossFireX interconnect, which means you can only run CrossFire with two cards.

The Gigabyte Radeon HD 7770 has a single 6-pin PCI Express power connector located at the end of the video card that is very easy to reach as nothing is around it! AMD says that a 500W or greater power supply is needed with one 6-pin PCI Express power connector. For those that want to run two Radeon HD 7770 cards in CrossFire you’ll need at least a 600W power supply and two 6-pin PCI Express power connectors.