Concluding Thoughts

The Radeon Hd 7700 serial scaled well in Crossfire, achieving well-nigh 80% efficiency. The cards high-strung in King Arthur II, which was only released in late January and will presumably receive meliorate driver support shortly. If you lot exclude that title, the Hard disk drive 7770 saw an 85% boost when doubled upward and the Hd 7750s averaged 86% faster.

That sounds slap-up on paper, but is it enough to consider the Crossfired HD 7700 series a valid pick for budget-minded gamers? Unfortunately, no -- or at least not yet.

Nosotros'll start with the Hd 7770. At $320, the dual-card configuration is threescore% more than expensive than the $200 Hard disk drive 6870 while delivering 39% more operation. Likewise, the duo is 33% pricier than the $240 GeForce GTX 560 Ti while offering only 29% better results on average.

Although we judge the dual HD 7700s are a tad cheaper and faster than a lone Hard disk drive 6970 ($350), we'd rather take the minor performance hitting and deal with a single card solution.

At $220, the HD 7750 Crossfire configuration is a slightly improve value than the Hard disk drive 7770s -- just as we establish when testing them as single cards. The dual HD 7750s are priced around 5% lower than the GTX 560 Ti and in our testing, the Crossfire solution performed almost 3% amend. But again, for such a small gain, we'd rather opt for the unmarried-card solution. It'd take a healthy 10% difference or more than for that opinion to change every bit running multiple GPUs in Crossfire or SLI comes with extra baggage.

As illustrated in King Arthur II, multi-GPU setups don't always play dainty with new games. It's common for AMD or Nvidia to add the necessary profiles later on a game launches, meaning you lot'd have to play with a single bill of fare until and then anyway.

Beyond compatibility bug, multi-GPU configurations tend to require more space, produce more heat and consume more power. For those reason, nosotros believe they should usually be reserved for those wanting to achieve maximum performance with high-end cards.

We recognize that mainstream cards can sometimes leverage Crossfire or SLI to deliver an incredible value. Sadly, that'southward not the case with the Hd 7770 or 7750. As nosotros found in our first review, the HD 7700 series is priced against superior products with a wider retention bus, more than bandwidth and more complex core designs. Nosotros hope this changes when Nvidia's next-generation cards arrive in the coming weeks and months. Until then, we can even so simply recommend a unmarried Hd 7750 for HTPC-like purposes.