Card Layout and Photos
With the card laying down, it’s hard to not get reminded of a batmobile or sporty card with the design of the R7770 Power Edition’s fan shroud. A Very unique design, it actually allows you to run the single fan, or use the extra fan MSI included in two ways. You can mount the fan over the current one or the entire fan shroud and fan actually slides over and you can mount the fan next to the other. If you look you can see the round area where the fan can mount.
If you look at the top and bottom areas of the fan you can actually see the round mounting points for the second fan. Even with just a single fan, this is a great design. The fan is very large covering a good portion of the heatsink below. My only complaint is that this design pushes the air back into the case
Down at the end of the card you have its single six pin power connection for power. This is more than enough to support the Power Editions 3+1+1 PWM design; this is 25% more than the reference design. This is perfect for supporting the new Triple Overvoltage ability when using MSI’s Afterburner software.
With one crossfire connection, the R7770 Power Edition isn’t any different than the other 7000 series cards. You can only run two card crossfire; this isn’t anything unusual, only top level cards can run triple and quad crossfire.
The second fan design is interesting, but also means that you have to hook the external fan up to something. MSI has placed a small two pin connection up on the top of the card. We did notice a small issue with ours when it came in. As you can see in the photos below, there is actually a set of wires jammed between the fan shroud and this plug, until it was moved I wasn’t able to plug the second fan in.
Much like XFX MSI has cut their logo into their PCI cover. This design though doesn’t seem to give the same airflow that you would see from the XFX design or even a standard cutout. For connections you are getting one dual link DVI connection, one full size display port, and one HDMI. Together you have a nice selection to pick from. Paired up with an active Displayport adapter you can still run Eyefinity as well.
With the R7770 Power Edition flipped over we can now see its full PCB. They went with a dark color that looks brown when circuits come up close to the surface. It’s a major improvement over some of the other PCB’s that we see. But I would still like to see it have a full black color.
