Diamond Radeon HD 6770 XOC Video Card Review

Final Thoughts and Conclusions

The Diamond Radeon HD 6770 XOC Video Card (6770PE51GEXOC) is aimed at the budget market and as will find out below is at the top of the price scale in this market, but is still a very capable gaming GPU. It survived all of our testing with only a few hiccups, among those were the heat issue as well as the fan is a bit loud at every speed level. But if you can look past and fix those issues you will have zero problems playing your games, watching movies or videos, or enjoying the HDMI sound at lower resolutions of course.

With a 1 year limited warranty for an unregistered Diamond Radeon HD 6770 XOC Video Card (6770PE51GEXOC), and a 5 year limited warranty if you take the time to register your Diamond Radeon HD 6770 XOC Video Card (6770PE51GEXOC) with Diamond you actually get a pretty decent budget GPU for $149.99 plus shipping to whatever state you live in, so lets just estimate around $10.00, that makes the Diamond Radeon HD 6770 XOC over the top on price The Diamond Radeon HD 6770 XOC appears to be the most expensive 6770 running at 900 Mhz right now. With most of the Radeon HD 6770 series being bundled with a new game you have to ask yourself if the 50 Mhz overclock is worth the price. Since GPU’s like the PowerColor PCS+ AX 6770 which also runs the core at 900 MHZ and is currently selling for $137.55, roughly $22.00 less shipped if we use our $10.00 shipping estimate, and it includes a Vortex ll cooler and is bundled with a copy of Dirt 3.

Although there was no ability to overclock the Diamond Radeon HD 6770 XOC Video Card (6770PE51GEXOC) it still performed good in all of our tests. Even with a big fan and heat sink the thermal grease used on the Diamond Radeon HD 6770 XOC Video Card (6770PE51GEXOC) caused the card to run at really high temperatures. It wasn’t until after applying another brand of thermal grease that the Diamond Radeon HD 6770 XOC Video Card (6770PE51GEXOC) ran at much more acceptable temperatures. With that being said you should not have to re-apply thermal grease to get your brand new video card to run correctly.

With the size coming in at around 7 inches it will fit into most any case out there on the market right now, but with a price that is far above the other video card manufacturers I would have a hard time justifying putting a Diamond Radeon HD 6770 XOC Video Card (6770PE51GEXOC) to good use in the near future.

Nathan Kirsch’s Thoughts:

I usually don’t offer my personal thoughts in my writers reviews, but I’m making an exception for this one. For starters the AMD Radeon HD 6770 is nothing more than a re-named AMD Radeon HD 5770 that originally came out in October 2009. I personally did the original review of that card and you can read about it here. AMD doesn’t hide this and they even show that the two are the same in their internal feature chart that you can see below.

The Diamond Multimedia Radeon HD 6770 XOC video card has several issues with it that can’t be ignored. First is the price. The Diamond Multimedia Radeon HD 6770 XOC is only available through Diamond multimedia and it’s priced at $149.99.

By the time you factor in shipping you are looking at $164.99 shipped for the Diamond Radeon HD 6770 XOC. This is a bit shocking since the Radeon HD 5770 came out at $159 when it was released in 2009. Sure, this one is factory overclocked, but is it worth the price? You can go to Newegg and buy the least expensive AMD Radeon HD 6770 for $99.99 shipped after rebate. Is this 50MHz overclock really worth an extra $65? No, not by a long shot. If you have $165 burning a hole in your pocket you can by a Radeon HD 6850 for $139.99 shipped after rebate or a Radeon HD 6870 for $149.99 shipped after rebate. Both the AMD Radeon HD 6870 and Radeon HD 6850 destroy the AMD Radeon HD 6770 XOC in the benchmarks and the both cost less money. I contacted Diamond Multimedia to let them know about the pricing issue with this card nearly three weeks ago and they said that it would be $139 when e-tail gets it with the possibility of it going lower. Since talking to them the price hasn’t budged and even if it was $10 cheaper with free shipping it would be priced the same as a Radeon HD 6850 with rebates and still priced too high.

The other issue with this card is the cheap heatsink that they used on it. From the outside this card looks to have a nice GPU cooler on it with a massive cooling fan that looks to perform well, but it doesn’t. They used a two piece design with a thin copper base plate being screwed to the larger aluminum cooling fins. This is not the ideal solution for moving heat away from the GPU. There are no heat pipes or vapor chambers with this card and the temperature results of nearly 60C at idle and 90C at load are very high. In fact these temperatures are higher than what we saw on the AMD Radeon HD 6870!

I’ll stop there as I think you get the point. This card is priced way too high and has a poor GPU cooler design on it. You can buy a Radeon HD 6850 or Radeon HD 6870 for less money than this and it will run cooler and play your games better. I hope Diamond Multimedia takes this feedback to heart and lowers the price on this card and will spend some more time on their cooling solutions. If you want to charge premium rates for your products then you better make sure everything is up to par. Sadly, this is a card that Legit Reviews can’t suggest to our readers.

The Legit Bottom Line: The Diamond Radeon HD 6770 XOC Video
Card has decent performance considering it is a budget card, but the
high temperatures and an overly high price really make this card not
worth the money.