I bought this card because of the great experience that I had with the following product; the ATI 6770 video card http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/B004YW5BE0/ref=oh_details_o03_s00_i00.
Also, I was excited by the idea that I would not have to upgrade the power supply on the old Dell tower that I was upgrading.
The 7750 will work with a 350 watt power supply as it has a lower power footprint. I purchased this card so that the machine I was upgrading
would be able to cable vga out to a monitor and HDMI out to the HDTV. Also the size of the card is favorable in that it only takes up one slot.
I was disappointed that I was unable to get the card to mirror the VGA display to the HDTV, using either the Catalyst or Windows XP software.
I was able however to extend the desktop to the HDTV. Also disappointing, was that the Catalyst software was unable to detect the resolution of the HDTV via its connection through the HDMI cable. I tried this on two different HDTVs. Nor, would any of the screen adjust Catalyst software have any effect on the HDTV.
So it took a lot of fiddling around to find the best resolution for the HDTV - that is to get the full picture on the screen and to fill the screen without flicker.
I did not find the Catalyst software as intuitive or responsive as I had on the ATI card.
The ATI 6770 video card was able to both mirror the desktop display on the HDTV and also to detect the proper resolution of HDTV automatically.
The only thing is that you do need a 500 watt power supply or greater to drive this card. The 6770 was a less expensive card, with more bang for the buck in my opinion. I found that when watching internet movies or computer generated movies that the optimum situation for me was to turn off the sound capabilities of the ATI card and channel my sound through a Creative sound blaster to the HDTV. Splitting the sound from the video makes sure on an old system with 4 gig of memory, that the video and sound playback is smooth for a full length feature film. The computer has its processor and bus, as do the sound and video.
One further note, I found that I had to eventually switch to chrome browser from my old favorite Firefox, as I was unable to resolve issues with Flash Player playing well at times and playing with crackling and popping sounds before eventually crashing at other times.
This card represents the future and good ideas, but I think that the implementation of the software drivers needs work. I will be monitoring the progress of this new line of cards with different brands to see what the reviews have to say. I like ease of use and when I pay 100.00 or more for a video card, I expect better than this, even if it is considered a mid range card.
12.17.12 addendum
Ok I have been going back and forth with xfx support, who are very responsive, and they suggested that I try a dvi cable to the monitor without vga adapter. Well guess what; it was then able to clone the monitor to the tv, but only if I turned on the computer with the monitor plugged in and then after booting into the Windows desktop, plugging in the hdmi cable to the hdtv. Walah, it then cloned the desktop to the tv. However, after I saved this setting in Catalyst software and rebooted the computer, the desktop immediately defaulted back to extended desktop only this time with the hdtv being the primary monitor and the desktop being the secondary monitor; and if I unchecked the extend my desktop button then my monitor would go black, just the reverse of what the hdtv used to do when it was considerred the secondary monitor. This is certainly a software driver issue and not a computer or hdtv hardware issue. Am I happy with this? No, as I wanted my elderly parent to be able to use her flat screen TV as a large monitor, while sitting on the couch, and to have the added flexability of being able to switch back to the monitor if she desired without having to change anything. So I am back at square one; with trying to get my desktop to clone or mirror to the hdtv. It is frustrating to have put in about 4 different sessions on this and still not be able to get this to do what I want.
12.25.12 problem solved
In addition to the momentary satisfaction mentioned above, the dvi cable only reversed the problem in that it made the card think that the tv was primary and the monitor was secondary. the problem was that the catalyst software refused to allow the card to mirror the monitor out to the hdtv. The way I finally solved this problem was to uninstall the catalyst software and the card driver under hardware devices and reboot the computer with the tv unplugged. After the reboot into windows desktop I reinstall catalyst and then after rebooting again into the desktop I plugged in the tv. this time catalyst allowed the desktop to be cloned to the hdtv.
Al in all this card is not as fast in performance, nor s it as crisp in display as the 6000 series cards that require at least a 500Watt power supply. I guess at this time the technology still demands more juice. btw, note that both systems between the first card and the second are identical, the only difference are the video cards and the power supplies.
In response to Kevin and as noted earlier in this review that xfx has good customer service, I updated the rating on this card to 4 stars. I had tried once before but it did not take for some reason.
I was not trying to bash xfx as I have used their cards many times and have always found them to be reliable, I just found that the 6770 was a better performer for me on my old del towers, also less expensive. But for those less tech savey, the 7750 may be a better choice because they will not have to potentially upgrade their power supplies and deal with all those cables.
| Max Screen Resolution | 2560 x 1600 |
|---|---|
| Graphics Coprocessor | AMD Radeon |
| Chipset Brand | AMD |
| Graphics Card Ram Size | 1 GB |
