AMD Radeon HD 7750 Pro Reviews

It may now be bigger and need external power, but AMD's tweaks to the HD 7750 make it a capable budget graphics card

We saw a distinct, near constant performance trend throughout all of our testing with the Radeon HD 7700 series cards. The Radeon HD 7770 GHz Edition offered good performance in all of our tests that was typically higher than the previous-generation Radeon HD 6790. The Radeon HD 7770 GHz Edition was also faster than the NVIDIA GeForce GTX 550 Ti, but it trailed the GeForce GTX 560, sometimes by a fairly large margin. The Radeon HD 7750’s performance was also good considering its lower-price and more modest specifications, but its performance was typically lower than the GeForce GTX 550 Ti’s. It did, however, clearly outpace the previous-generation Radeon HD 6670.

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

The AMD Radeon HD 7750 is a capable and efficient budget graphics card, but not much more.

The Radeon HD 7750 achieved the same performance level as the GeForce GTS 450 on all the games we ran; it was between 4% and 9% faster than its main competitor on 3DMark 11. The greatest difference between these two video cards, however, was for “GPGPU” applications, i.e., using the GPU to run regular programs in order to increase performance. On Media Espresso, the new Radeon HD 7750 was 19% faster than the GeForce GTS 450, proving that the new “GNC” architecture from AMD is really optimized for this kind of application. The GeForce GTX 550 Ti, which costs a little more than the Radeon HD 7750, was between 5% and 12% faster than the reviewed card on games, but on Media Espresso the new Radeon HD 7750 was 19% faster. The Radeon HD 7750, unlike the Radeon HD 7770 GHz, is priced right, and provides a good price/performance ratio for the user who is looking for an entry-level mainstream video card at the USD 100-110 price range, with the advantage of being significantly faster for regular applications that use the GPU in order to increase processing performance, such as Media Espresso and Photoshop.

A single-slot, low-power graphics card with reasonable performance, but it's just too expensive

Its $109 list price is the only irresistible thing about AMD Radeon HD 7750, an almost-budget card that can’t keep up with previous generations’ champs.

A disappointing price means this relatively weak card holds little appeal for gamers

Our opinions on this freshman 'Cape Verde' chip are dependent on UK pricing. If the $95 US price converts somewhere near the actual exchange rate without too much mark-up, it'll be available at £80 or less, and if that's the case you'll be getting some great performance returns for your outlay if you skipped a generation or two in your graphics card upgrade schedule. If that UK price falls closer to the £100 mark though, it'll be a misfire, rather than one of those classic AMD bargains you wait for with each new gen's advent. The HD 7750 is quicker than its big Nvidia rival, the GTX 550 Ti, and its predecessor, the HD 5770 - but not the HD 6770. General performance is limited primarily by a slender 128-bit frame buffer, however the die-shrink down from 45nm to 28nm and increase in transistor count that comes with it gives this Southern Islands card a definite edge in tessellation-heavy tasks. It's apparent in its strong Heaven 2.5 score, but in non-synthetic benchmarks the performance gain from the new architecture isn't as noticeable. Overclocking the HD 7750's a mixed bag, too. On the one hand, it handles big core and memory clock increases smoothly and without crashes - we had ours cranked up to 900 MHz on the core clock from the 800 MHz stock setting without any glitching or hangs. The downside though, is that we didn't really achieve a whole lot of performance increase by doing so – it only reported a 0.1 FPS increase when we ran the Heaven 2.5 benchmark. That, along with general performance, is likely to change as the 7700 series' drivers mature though.

We believe the lackluster performance stem from the HD 7700 series' limited 128-bit bus, which results in a paltry 72GB/s bandwidth -- less than the HD 5750 had and far less than the GTX 460. This makes the HD 7700 cards an unattractive prospect for serious gamers, though the HD 7750 has its merits.

The AMD Radeon HD 7770 and Radeon HD 7750 are solid cards, but pricing and a market flooded with mainstream cards makes buying a mainstream video card confusing right now.

Unlike the Radeon HD 7970 and HD 7950 3GB graphics cards the Cape Verde-based HD 7770 and HD 7750 1GB cards aren't nearly the slam dunk. Instead hitting the really high price points where competition is somewhat limited, these two enter into a field that is incredibly crowded both with previous AMD cards and current NVIDIA options. As it stands today the Radeon HD 7770 is the most power efficient card at the $160 price point though it is surrounded by cards that can offer similar or higher levels of performance for $30 less or $30 more. The Radeon HD 7750 gets a strong recommendation on the other hand as at $109 it beats out or ties the more expensive GTX 550 Ti while also leaving the Radeon HD 6770/5770 behind as well. The fact that is doesn't require any external power and can perform as well as it does using as little as 55 watts really puts the HD 7750 in a unique place. Now, all that is left for gamers is to wait on the upcoming Radeon HD 7800 Pitcairn GPU to round out the Southern Islands architecture completely and to look forward to the arrival of Kepler. It is going to be a very interesting spring...

The game test results the HD 7750 1GB posted are disappointing in that they in no way suggest AMD's new budget graphics card is a worth upgrade from other popular low end models such as the HD 5770 1GB or GTX 550 Ti 1GB. In fact, both bettered it in some of our tests. The HD 6850 1GB was significantly faster in all our tests, yet many etailers are cutting its price in an attempt to shift stock as newer generation hardware arrives - great news if you're in the market for such a graphics card. The HD 7770 1GB is a much better buy, at only £15 more, although even it doesn't make a clear case against the HD 6850 1GB. The only reason you should consider an HD 7750 1GB is if power consumption is a critical factor in your system; here it excels and doesn't even need a 6-pin power connector, while also maintaining single slot cooling. For every other situation, though, it's a bit of a let down when we'd hoped it might offer performance close to the HD 6850 1GB for a lot less. Sadly this isn't the case.