Value and Conclusion

As we mentioned in the introduction, we don't expect anyone to buy two Radeon HD 7700 series cards in one go, and instead follow an incremental-upgrade path, by buying one card to suit their needs, and later upgrade to a CrossFire setup as they begin to feel the need for more performance or higher resolution. Given that, the HD 7700 CrossFire and HD 7750 CrossFire setups are each good options, but given a few factors.

The Radeon HD 7770 CrossFire offers excellent scaling with the current drivers, which could only go up as drives mature and get optimized for more games. 1680x1050 and 1920x1200 (or 1920x1080) will be two resolutions people will find themselves typically gaming at, with HD 7700 CrossFire. Overall, taking into account all resolutions we tested at, the HD 7770 CrossFire offers performance somewhere between the HD 6950 and HD 6970. However, if you look at just the two resolutions we mentioned a little earlier, you will see that this setup offers higher performance than the HD 6970, and offers performance close to NVIDIA's GeForce GTX 570.

Likewise, the Radeon HD 7750 CrossFire also offers good scaling, but we'll stop short of calling it 'excellent'. The drivers need some refinement to handle HD 7750 CrossFire, since the setup was found to be a little unstable in some games. Overall, the HD 7750 CrossFire sits somewhere between the Radeon HD 5850 and Radeon HD 6870; while in resolutions such as 1680x1050 and 1920x1200, it is not a big departure from the HD 6870. But given that this is a departure from a single-GPU performance that's roughly in the neighborhood of previous-generation HD 5770, there still is some performance improvement on offer.

Like we said, the two are each good options but given a few factors. One of the most important of these being price. Since you will be buying two complete graphics cards, with complete packages (unless you can score OEM or open-box), you will be paying the cost of two cards. Even if adding the second card doesn't offer a 100% increase in performance, it does amount to a 100% increase in cost, unless of course there are future price cuts that make the second card cheaper.

Currently, two HD 7770 cards would set you back by at least $318, while two HD 7750s will cost you exactly $100 less, at $218. The HD 7770 sits right in the middle of single HD 6950 2 GB, which costs as low as $259, and the $349 HD 6970, while being $10 cheaper than the cheapest GeForce GTX 570 out there. The HD 7750 costs about $50 more than the cheapest Radeon HD 6870, while offering similar performance. So the HD 7770 CrossFire has much better performance per Dollar than the HD 7750 CrossFire.

Another important factor is that these setups have inherent problems of being multi-GPU. To begin with, they require two PCI-Express long slots on your system. They require to be optimized per application/game. AMD and NVIDIA do periodically give out Catalyst Application Profiles and NVIDIA SLI Profile updates that do the job, but you will sometimes find yourself in situations where the newly-launched you just installed isn't optimized for multi-GPU, leaving you to face performance issues till application profiles are out.

Overall, the HD 7770 CrossFire emerges as a decent multi-GPU setup, offering good scaling, and fitting well with its competitive environment. The HD 7750 CrossFire, on the other hand, has quite a bit of work left getting the drivers to work well. We doubt AMD can toy with the price much.