File this under “rumor” for now, but Fud is usually pretty accurate with things like these. According to his report, the budget version of the recently released 28nm AMD “Southern Islands” architecture will retail for around $149. After all, not everyone wants to spend $550 on a video card (even if it is pretty awesome). However, looking at these rumored specs, I can’t help but think that it would be better to wait for the middle range solution.
The Radeon HD 7770 is based on the Cape Verde XT chip and it should end up clocked at 900MHz. It has 896 stream processors as well as 56 texture units and 16 ROPs. The memory is clocked at 1375MHz (5.5GHz GDDR5 effective).
Since the card is trimmed to a 128-bit memory interface, its memory bandwidth is 88GB/s and it comes with 1GB memory.
The sticking point for me is the 128-bit memory, with a paltry 88 GB/s memory bandwidth. Current sub-$200 video cards such as the GeForce 560 and Radeon HD 6870 have 256-bit memory, and are around the 130-145 MB/s range.
Of course, memory bandwidth isn’t everything, but that is quite a handicap when you consider the next step up, the 7800 series, will certainly have full memory bandwidth, more shaders, and higher clock speeds. These should be in the $250-300 range. Plus, by then, we should have a good idea of what Nvidia will bring to the table.
Here are some PC hardware reviews from around the web:
- GIGABYTE X79-UD5 (Intel X79) Motherboard Review @ tweaktown
- Anidées AI-6 chassis review @ guru3d
- Gigabyte GA-Z68XP-UD3-iSSD Motherboard Review @ PCSTATS
- Kingston DataTraveler HyperX 3.0 64GB Flash Drive Review @ Techgage
- Zalman CNPS11X Cpu Cooler @ Rbmods
- Steelseries Cataclysm Gaming Mouse Review @ HardwareLOOK
- Antec P280 Performance One Case Review @ Ninjalane
- Antec Eleven Hundred @ techPowerUP
- Silverstone Grandia Series GD06 HTPC Case Review @ eTeknix
- SilverStone Raven RV03 Chassis Review @ OCIA
- Fractal Design Arc Midi Black Case Review @ Legit Reviews
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