Diamond Radeon HD 6770 XOC Video Card Review

A Closer Look At The Diamond Radeon HD 6770 XOC Video Card

Now lets go ahead and take a closer look at the Diamond Radeon HD 6770 XOC. Unlike most of the video cards in the 6000 series, this card is mounted on a custom PCB that is much smaller than the normal 6000 series video cards. We can also see that the PCB is red and again most of 6000 series cards that I have reviewed have been on a black PCB.

Above we get a good look at the front of the Diamond Radeon HD 6770 XOC GPU. It has a single fan setup with a heatsink that is copper on the bottom with aluminum fins on top. The heat sink fan combination cools only the GPU as it does not even touch the memory at all. The Diamond Radeon HD 6770 XOC Video Card is roughly 7 inches long in total and is 4.5 inches in height and weighs roughly 1 pound.

Now lets flip the Diamond Radeon HD 6770 XOC Video Card over and take a look at the back. Not much to see here but you can get a good look at the four mounting screws that hold the heat sink and fan in place.

The Diamond Radeon HD 6770 XOC Graphics Card has just a single 6 pin power connection which is mounted at the rear of the card. When I only see one power connector the first thing that comes to mind is how well will the Diamond Radeon HD 6770 XOC Video Card overclock. The Diamond Radeon HD 6770 XOC GPU requires a minimum of a 500 watt power supply with at least one 6 pin connector and Diamond says the Diamond Radeon HD 6770 XOC only uses 108 watts of power. If you want to run a Crossfire setup you will need two six pin connectors.

Here we get a much better view of the fan and as you can see it takes up the majority of the front of the Diamond Radeon HD 6770 XOC Video Card. If you are looking for a small card that is quiet for say a HTPC rig or something else that needs to be quiet, this is not the card for you. Even at idle you can hear the fan on the Diamond Radeon HD 6770 XOC GPU over everything else in your system, and once it gets revved up to cool down a full load, I could even hear it with headphones on.

Now lets take a look at the connectors on the Diamond Radeon HD 6770 XOC GPU. It contains two DVI connectors, a Display port connector and an HDMI connector. So you can use just about any setup with the Diamond Radeon HD 6770 XOC Graphics Card. If you are still using VGA just slap on the VGA to DVI adapter and you are ready to go.

Here we get a quick peek from the top angle of the Diamond Radeon HD 6770 XOC Video Card. You can see that it is capable of a multi card crossfire setup, something that is not found in the Radeon HD 6800 series.

Now lets flip it around tot he other side and we can see the PCI-E connection point.

I decided to remove the heatsink and fan due to some really high temperatures that I was getting from the card, but it allowed us to get a better look at the bottom side of the heat sink as well as a good look at the actual GPU itself. Above you can see the 1/8″ thick copper plate of the heat sink and judging from the marks that were all over it, it had been removed and reinstalled a couple of times. as the smudges that you can see were not created by me. I even tried to remove them and they won’t come off. The little copper plate is glued to the aluminum heatsink so I think this may affect the thermal transfer and is causing part of the heat problem.

Just for giggles I tried to get a really close shot of the GPU. You can see the laser etching of the ATI logo and where the chip was manufactured.