The Card

Having a look at the video card you can see we've got a new design when it comes to the heatsink here. The cooler becomes even more interesting, though, when we throw the other fan into the mix using the "Transthermal Design" by MSI. We'll quickly just cover the rest of the card, though, before we go into more detail on the extra fan.

Taking a look around the video card you can see we've got a single 6-pin PCIe power connector towards the back while closer to the front we've got a typical single CrossFire connector.

On the I/O side of things we've got a Dual-Link DVI connector, HDMI port and DisplayPort to round off the connection side. You can also see the top half of the video card has the MSI logo and some vents to help the hot air escape out the back of the case.

As we've mentioned already, the MSI HD 7770 Power Edition brings with it an extra fan, which allows you to have the cooler run in three configurations. The first is the one you see at the top of the page.

The second configuration allows you to install the fan on top of the standard one which MSI dub as "Double Airflow Mode". This mode provides higher air pressure over the core to keep the temperature down.

The other mode and the one we're using today is "Dual Fan Mode" and is said to drop the card temperature by the most thanks to a bigger area for dissipation and more efficient cooling on the PWM and memory. To do this you simple slide the cooler to the right making the video card longer and then slot the fan in place. While better cooling is on offer from both these configurations the cost is that you're going to have added noise into the mix.

Specifications

As you'd expect the MSI HD 7770 Power Edition comes overclocked out of the box and looking below you can see we've got an 1100MHz core up from the default 1000MHz.

As for the 1GB of GDDR5, MSI have chosen to leave that alone in this case with it coming in at the default 4500MHz QDR clock. Of course being a Power Edition video card we're going to overclock it today to see just what we can get out of it.

Looking above you can see we ended up with a core clock of 1180MHz which is a nice increase of the reference 1000MHz clock while the memory came in at an impressive 5200MHz QDR, which is a nice increase over the default 4500MHz QDR clock.