AMD Radeon HD 7750 (900MHz edition) review

The original AMD Radeon HD 7750 was a budget graphics card with the advantage of reasonable performance in modern games, while still being a single-slot card which didn’t need an external power connector.

This made it a good upgrade for a budget PC, which may not have had room in its case or a good enough PSU for a powerful dual-slot card. AMD has now changed the reference design for the HD 7750, and in some ways its decisions are bizarre.

The new card has the same basic architecture as the old version, but the core clock speed has increased from 800 to 900MHz. Unfortunately, this means that the new card is not as budget PC-friendly as the old one. It’s now a dual-slot model, and the extra power needed by the faster-clocked chip means it now needs a single 6-pin PCI Express power connector.

As we noticed when AMD upgraded its Radeon HD 7970 graphics card from 925MHz to 1GHz, a fairly moderate core clock speed increase can make a big difference in games. This was apparent in our games tests. In Dirt 3 at 1,920×1,080 with 4x anti-aliasing and Ultra detail, the 900MHz HD 7750 managed a smooth 35.5fps, and the frame rate never dropped below a still-playable 30.7fps. This is over 10% quicker than the original 800MHz HD 7750 managed, and is the difference between a playable frame rate and occasional sub-30fps jerkiness.

In Crysis 2 we had to turn the detail levels down three levels from Ultra to High to get a playable frame rate of 41fps, and even at these settings the game dipped to below 25fps occasionally. We also attached three monitors to run our Eyefinity Dirt 3 test; the card has one dual-link DVI, one HDMI and two Mini DisplayPort sockets, so you’ll need an active adaptor if you don’t have a DisplayPort screen. Running Dirt 3 on three monitors at 5,760×1,080, we saw 33fps from the new 900MHz card, compared to 28.8fps from the 800MHz version – not a huge difference, but the new card just pushes the game into smooth 30fps territory.

If you can put up with the fact that it takes up more room in your case and needs a separate power connector, the new 900MHz HD 7750 is a worthwhile update. Its speed boost pushes moderately-demanding modern games such as Dirt 3 over the magic 30fps threshold for smooth gameplay. Its performance also comes within 15% of the HD 7770, which is 20% more expensive. The update to the HD 7750 turns it from an also-ran into a strong budget graphics card.