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Let me start off by saying that this card currently retails for about 120 dollars. This puts it right under a GTX 550 Ti and therefore we should see performance that matches this. We put this card through all of our benchmarks and game play stressing to give you a good idea of what you can expect to get out of this card.
If you take a look at the benchmarks this card didn't perform as well as the HD 7770. This card also comes in at about 30 dollars or so less than the HD 7770. What was really amazing though is that all of our games still looked really good with this card. We weren't able to get playable performance with BattleField 3, but you have to remember that for testing purposes this game was totally maxed out at 1920 x 1200. In all of our other games though this card was able to produce playable frame rates. What I mean by this is that our average frame rates were above 30 frames per second for the most part. That's pretty amazing for a card in this price range.
One thing that I really have to stress is that during all of our testing this card never got above 55 degrees Celsius. We tested this card on an open-air test bench and therefore it really didn't get any direct cooling except for what was coming off of the CPU heat sink. In a case with good airflow, this card should be able to stay even cooler and might even be able to take a slight overclock. This really is quite incredible and shows that these types of heat sinks have come a long way. now this is also due to the fact that these are 28nm GPUs that don't produce as much heat and are also more power efficient. There really isn't more that you could ask for from a thermal solution of this type.
There are those that won't be too happy with the performance from this card. For those individuals though there are other cards out there to choose from. These cards also feature CrossFire support, but they will be severely limited with AMD's Eyefinity technology. If these are features that you really require, there are other cards like Sapphire's 7770, 7950 and 7970 cards that fully support those features. I would also recommend a more powerful card if you're planning on using AMD's HD3D technology as well. That technology will also require more graphical horse power to look good. This card is really geared more for the home theater type of user or those that are just doing some light gaming. Given that it's totally quiet; this would make it ideal for home theater usage.
