Pictures of AMD's upcoming Radeon HD 7770 mainstream graphics card have leaked online courtesy of a forum member at Rage3D. The new card is based on the 28nm Cape Verde GPU, which is a direct replacement for Juniper, and represents the first major upgrade to the Radeon HD 5770 in two years since the last generation Radeon HD 6770 was basically a rebrand based on the same GPU core as its predecessor.
The shots were not accompanied by technical specifications but there are a few things we can take away from looking at the card. The Radeon HD 7770 looks rather similar to Nvidia's GeForce GTX 460, with a dual-slot design and a large diameter fan in the middle pushing air down vertically.
The GPU itself is quite small and Fudzilla ventures to guess it should measure up at under 150mm2. The reference card includes the usual three display outputs – DVI, HDMI and miniDisplayPort. A single 6-pin PCI-e is used to power the card, suggesting a TDP below 150W, and possibly close to 100W according to reports. There's also a single Crossfire connector for up to two-card configurations and the four GDDR5 memory chips on the exposed PCB indicate a possible 128-bit memory interface.
According to Fudzilla, the Radeon HD 7700 series is scheduled to arrive sometime around mid-February. The Cape Verde GPU powering these cards will be based on AMD's Graphics Core Next architecture, while everything below the series is expected to be rebrands of the VLIW5 HD 6000 family with few minor tweaks.
