Introduction

AMD's Radeon HD 7700 series hasn't been a series that we've welcomed with open arms. Priced highly against the Radeon HD 6800 series which continued to flood the market and performance that sat behind it meant that the HD 7700 series just never got us all that excited from a value for money point of view and that's a big deal.

It wasn't until we saw the Sapphire HD 7750 Ultimate that we found ourselves getting a little excited about the model thanks to the custom passive cooler that Sapphire had implemented. Outside of that model, though, the HD 7700 series wasn't doing much for us.

Today, though, we hope that is going to change with the MSI HD 7770 Power Edition video card. Straight away the HD 7770 Power Edition has two things going for it. The first is it is part of the Power Edition series, a series that brings with it added voltage options which in turn normally help boost overall overclocking performance by a fair margin.

The second thing going for it and probably the more important is the recent price drops on the HD 7000 series of video cards which sees the HD 7700 series drop a little. Obviously MSI (probably) knew of these upcoming price drops and waited for the perfect time to launch this model - right now. Combining these two things we're hoping that the HD 7700 series can begin to see a bit of extra life and brightness in our eyes.

Before we get into the performance side of things there's a few things we need to do. The first is as always is checking out the package and bundle. Once we've done that we'll move onto the video card itself before we look at the specifications and what we managed to overclock the card to. And from there it's all about performance.

Package

I love the new box design that MSI has used with the HD 7770 Power Edition. It's really fresh looking and just overall nice to see something a bit different. Hopefully we'll see a similar design with other Power Edition video cards when they hit the market.

Looking at the bundle there's for the most part nothing too out of the ordinary with some paperwork, driver CD, DVI to VGA connector and dual Molex to 6-pin PCIe power connector.

Saying that, there's an extra fan included in the bundle and you can see what it's used for in the box images with a cooler that can be transformed. We'll cover it in more detail on the next page, though.