Introduction

I've made my opinion of the HD 7700 series known since the model launched roughly one year ago. What we can't deny is that over the past year the model has become more and more attractive as the price of it comes down. The series on a whole, though, has gone exactly as I thought and said it would.

We got a model that launched at a price that was too high, and with performance that was too low. Overall the model wasn't bad; it just hit at the wrong price point. I always said, though, as time went on, and as the price went down, and performance improved as we saw new drivers, the model would become more and more attractive.

This has happened in a slightly more extreme manner than originally thought, though, because of the model having such a long life cycle. For years it felt like we had new models every six to nine months, but as we just mentioned, this is a model that's been around for a year now.

The particular HD 7770 video card we're looking at today comes from HIS and is labeled as the HD 7770 iCooler 1GB. Since it feels like it's been forever since we've taken the time to overclock this model, we figured we'd do it today and find out just what kind of performance we're able to get out of it.

In no surprise, though, we've got to go through and do a couple of things before we get to that. The first thing we'll do is check out the box and see what main features are being highlighted on the model. Once we've done that we'll move inside the box to see what's going on with what will probably be a relatively small bundle before checking out the card itself. We'll quickly then take the time to have a look at the clock speeds the card carries out of the box before we overclock it and see what kind of numbers we're able to pull. Once that's done it's onto the fun stuff, we'll quickly cover our testbed and then get stuck into the performance side of things.

Package

Having a look at the box we don't have a heap of information as it's quite small. The front gives us the model number and a bit of information while the back gives us a bit more of a run down along with a couple of the logos that HIS has acquired over the years. Overall there's nothing all that fancy, so we'll open up the box and check out the bundle that is being offered by HIS.

Looking at the bundle you can see it's relatively small. We've got a driver CD, manual and case sticker packed in a lice little folder that we're used to seeing. We've got no CrossFire bridge, DVI to VGA connector or anything like that. Considering the lower end nature and price we didn't expect a lot in the bundle.