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A forum member at Rage3D has leaked the first pictures of AMD's performance GPU – Cape Verde XT – to be branded Radeon HD 7770.

Cape Verde is the direct replacement to Juniper – first sold as Radeon HD 5770 and then rebranded to HD 6770. AMD will finally give its mainstream performance class products an performance upgrade for the first time in over 2 years.

The Radeon HD 7770 reference design inherits its overall design cues from the HD 7970. The standard cooling design for AMD GPUs in this range – blower fan at one end – has been replaced by a large diameter fan pushing air down vertically. This design is very similar to the one first introduced with GeForce GTX 460. The length of HD 7770 is also similar to the GTX 460 – and by extension HD 5770/6770 – around 8.25".

HD 7770 features 3 display outputs – DVI, HDMI and miniDisplayPort. Like Juniper XT, it is requires a single 6-pin PCI-e connector, with a power consumption somewhere in the early-100s Watts. A single Crossfire connector enables multi-GPU with a maximum of 2 GPUs. The reference PCB features 4 memory chips – which indicates a 128-bit memory interface, as in HD 5700/6700. Of course, we can expect the GDDR5 memory to run at a higher frequency.

Finally, the Cape Verde die itself is relatively small for this segment. While Juniper XT weighs in at 166 mm2 and GF116 at 230 mm2, Cape Verde at first glance appears to be well under 150 mm2.

Cape Verde is expected to be the cheapest GCN based product. Everything below HD 7700 series – from HD 7600 and down – is expected to be rebrands with minor tweaks from HD 6000 series featuring the VLIW-5 architecture.

Source: Rage3D Forums