14 DAY TRIAL // The existence of the Radeon HD 7770, the cheapest AMD graphics card based on the Graphics Core Next (GCN) architecture, was just confirmed by a series of leaked images that made their appearance on the Web a short while ago.
The card will come as the direct descendant of the Radeon HD 5770 and its HD 6770 rebrand as it targets the same mainstream performance class, but this time it will utilize the new Cape Verde XT core.
On the outside, the cooling solution employed by the Radeon HD 7700 looks surprisingly similar with that introduced by Nvidia with the GTX 460, although the shroud is now painted in AMD’s colors and it slightly resembles the HD 7970 that was leaked at the end of last week.
Moving to the back of the HD 7770 we see that AMD has decided to pair the graphics card with 3 display outputs, one DVI, one HDMI and a mini-DisplayPort connector.
Just like it’s the case with Juniper XT, the HD 7770 requires only a single 6-pin PCI-e connector, which seems to imply that its power consumption is set at a little over 100W.
Two-way CrossFireX is also supported by the AMD graphics card and the reference design includes four GDDR5 memory chips, which seems to indicate the presence of a 128-bit wide memory controller.
The operating speed of the chips is not yet known, but we expect these to come clocked higher than the current HD 5770/6770.
The operating frequency of the GPU also isn’t known, but from what we can tell from the pictures its die seems to be smaller than that of Juniper XT, VR-Zone claiming that it measures well under 150 mm².
Sadly, the launch date of the HD 7770 is not yet known, but we expect it to arrive in the first part of 2012.
