After Radeon introduced the flagship chip HD 7970, the company quickly put on the market two budget solutions that were created based on the GCN architecture. Nryvye AMD Radeon HD 7700 Series cards, the characteristics and price of which satisfy the needs of middle and low price segment customers, immediately became popular because of the almost ideal price-quality ratio. Let's see what the feature of these chips is.
Ruler appearance
AMD pays special attention to budget solutions. Most often, TOP video cards cannot compete with Nvidia's flagships, however, younger chips surely hold the bar of popularity. Given the fact that graphics solutions costing less than $ 200 are sold very often (it is this segment that accounts for the majority of sales), AMD’s strategy for developing this niche is justified. As a result, we see many different graphics platforms from AMD, created on the basis of the Barts and Juniper processors.
But the popular solutions HD 5770 and HD 6770 are becoming obsolete, and they were replaced by the AMD Radeon HD 7700 Series, the specifications of which will be listed below. But the replacement should not be equivalent, it must become better in its parameters. The 7700 line, which was new at that time, is such thanks to its GCN architecture.
Technical specifications AMD Radeon HD 7700 Series
In addition to the new GCN-architecture, maps use the Cape Verde GPU. Of course, it is inferior to TOP solutions, because it contains 10 Compute Unit. Each of them contains 64 stream processors. In total, this gives 640 processors, which is very small. Even the relatively old HD 5770 has 800 stream processors.
Also, these video cards have two memory controllers that provide a 128-bit bus. The Cape Verde processor also has a 0.5 GB cache. The new architecture is flexible and allows better use of available resources of computing units. There is also a tessellation unit, but the most important change is the transition to a 28-nm process technology, which made it possible to raise the core frequency to 1 GHz. Note that the HD 7770 was the first video card that is produced with such a core frequency in series.
Differences between the 7700 Series
The second video card based on the Cape Verde processor is the HD 7750 in the AMD Radeon HD 7700 Series line. Its characteristics are trimmed, and this is logical, given that we are talking about a younger chip. It is equipped with a processor with truncated computing units. In HD 7770 there were 10 of them, in HD 7750 there were only 8. Therefore, the number of stream processors dropped to 512, and there were only 32 working texture units. The frequency was also reduced to 800 MHz, but the memory frequency did not change (4500 MHz) .
The power characteristics of the AMD Radeon HD 7700 Series are not impressive. The oldest graphics consumes 80 watts, the youngest is limited to 55 watts. The latter does not require a power connector (enough power through the PCI slot). All these differences come down to one of the most important differences in the characteristics of the AMD Radeon HD 7700 Series: the bandwidth of the HD 7750 card is 12.8 Gb / s; The throughput of the HD 7770 is much higher at 16 Gb / s.
New HD 7790 chip
When everyone thought that the line would be limited to only these two video cards, AMD supplemented the series with new HD 7790 graphics. This happened a year after the release of both cards in the series. The new model has become a competitor for the GTX 650 Ti from Nvidia, and very solid.
The new AMD Radeon HD 7700 Series graphics card features that are very different from the parameters of the series models. It uses the all-new Bonaire GPU on the advanced architecture of GCN 1.1. The changes here mainly concerned the improvement of energy saving technology. The new chip also supports heterogeneous architecture instructions, which makes it possible to combine computing capabilities with the CPU.
The new chip has a 14 GCN Compute Unit, which is why the number of stream processors has increased to 896. This means that the new video card in the lineup is much closer to the HD 7800 series than to its own. However, the bus here remained 128-bit, but the memory frequency was increased to 6 GHz, and the GPU has the same frequency (1 GHz) as the younger model. All this allowed to achieve an increase in throughput.
Asus Radeon HD7790
The best manufacturer who managed to implement a cool cooling system is Asus. In addition, the manufacturer was able to overclock the chip by raising its frequency and improving performance. Photos of the AMD Radeon HD 7700 Series, in particular, the Asus HD 7790, you see in the article.
Thanks to the cool cooling system, the card remains cold even at sufficiently large loads. In the game Crysis: Warhead for 12 minutes, the card warmed up to only 60 degrees, and the fan speed did not exceed 1,480 rpm. This is an ideal result in the complete absence of noise.