XFX Radeon HD 7770 Black Edition Overclocked 1GB Graphics Card Review

From our charts, we can clearly see that the card has some good figures, especially when looking at the value behind the card and the 7770 as a whole. Due to the factory overclock speeds, we have managed to see some nice boosts in performance, but we wanted to see if we could push things even further by overclocking both the GPU clock and memory clock speeds to squeeze every last piece of performance from this card.

We will be using the typical suite of applications including MSI’s Afterburner, GPU-z, Furmark and 3DMark 11. We stick to these programs as they are favoured in the community and give strong results when we’ve used them in the past.

As always, we started by increasing the GPU clock on its own first to see how far it can be pushed, and then turn our focus to the memory. Once we’ve found the maximum speeds for both clocks, we try them together, which sometimes gives fantastic results, though other times find that we need to claw back the speeds slightly to get them playing ball with each other.

After tweaking for quite some time with the help of our benchmarking and overclocking tools, we settled the card on 1230MHz, an increase of 135MHz (12.3%) on the GPU clock and a smaller, yet still good increase of 1265MHz from 1245MHz giving us an increase of 20MHz (1.6%). While the memory overclock wasn’t astounding, we’ve found from previous experience that results are bettered by pushing the GPU core clock to the limits instead.

After we had overclocked and ran 3DMark11, we continued to run the rest of our benchmark tools to confirm stability and found that at the speeds above, the card remained stable with only a slight temperature increase.