The Test

For the 5700 series launch, AMD issued some new drivers as the previous 8.66 driver set did not include support for these cards. The driver set we used for these cards is 8.66.6, which is from the same branch as the earlier drivers. In our own testing, we haven’t seen any performance differences between these drivers and the previous ones on the 5800 series cards, but AMD did note that certain configurations might see a small performance boost. As such our results are still using the original 8.66 driver for the 4000 and 5800 series.

Also, as AMD sent us a pair of 5770s, we have tested these cards in a Crossfire configuration. This configuration is largely academic, as 2 5770s is just shy of the price of a 5870 and brings with it all of the limitations of multi-GPU scaling as compared to single-GPU scaling.

On a final note, our 5750 sample is a 1GB card.

CPU: Intel Core i7-920 @ 3.33GHz
Motherboard: Intel DX58SO (Intel X58)
Chipset Drivers: Intel 9.1.1.1015 (Intel)
Hard Disk: Intel X25-M SSD (80GB)
Memory: Patriot Viper DDR3-1333 3 x 2GB (7-7-7-20)
Video Cards:

ATI Radeon HD 5870
ATI Radeon HD 5850
ATI Radeon HD 5770
ATI Radeon HD 5750
ATI Radeon HD 4870 X2
ATI Radeon HD 4890
ATI Radeon HD 4870 1GB
ATI Radeon HD 4850
ATI Radeon HD 3870
ATI Radeon HD 4670 512MB
NVIDIA GeForce GTX 295
NVIDIA GeForce GTX 285
NVIDIA GeForce GTX 275
NVIDIA GeForce GTX 260 Core 216
NVIDIA GeForce GTS 250
NVIDIA GeForce 8800GT

Video Drivers:

NVIDIA ForceWare 190.62
ATI Catalyst Beta 8.66
ATI Catalyst Beta 8.66.6
ATI Catalyst 9.9

OS: Windows 7 Ultimate 64-bit

Meet The 5750 Crysis: Warhead
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  • strikeback03 - Tuesday, October 13, 2009 - link

    10 hrs a day is modest? That seems high to me, unless you are doing work that pays on this, I would think most people don't have 10hrs a day for recreational computing.
  • Mint - Tuesday, October 13, 2009 - link

    We're not talking about most people, we're talking about people who bother to get a 5770 instead of living with IGPs. Many people leave their computer on 24/7 to download torrents or fold or act as a file server (it's nice to access it from work) or whatever. I think 10 hours is a reasonable average for the target audience.

    Even if you reduce it to 5 hours a day, though, that's still $8/year. I like to keep video cards for a long time (usu. 2 years or more), and even when I upgrade, the old one is usually handed down.

    My point is that it's not something to ignore when comparing to the 4870. It was much less relevent for $300 cards with a 20W-30W difference (4870 vs GTX260 at launch), but now it's a 50W difference for $150 cards.
  • UNHchabo - Wednesday, October 14, 2009 - link

    Personally, I wish that the 4770 had been included in the power charts. It may be a largely irrelevant card for price/performance, but it's still the cheapest 40nm card that AMD makes.
  • Zingam - Tuesday, October 13, 2009 - link

    Real competition does wonderful things! If NVIDIA hasn't done it so great with 8800, we would never had these great prices by ATI today!

    Unfortunately there is nothing like that on the CPU side. :(
  • MadMan007 - Tuesday, October 13, 2009 - link

    Is the GTS 250 512MB or 1GB? It's not even stated in the test setup notes.
  • Ryan Smith - Tuesday, October 13, 2009 - link

    1GB.
  • Adul - Tuesday, October 13, 2009 - link

    http://www.monoprice.com/products/product.asp?c_id...">http://www.monoprice.com/products/produ...1&p_...

    As long as the video card supports outputting hdmi through the display port this will do. So the question is does it support hdmi signals through the display port?
  • Ryan Smith - Tuesday, October 13, 2009 - link

    Passive dongles are not supported on the 5000 series. It has to be an active dongle.
  • danielkza - Tuesday, October 13, 2009 - link

    There's a typo in page 5, I think you meant 'GTS 250' instead of 'GTX 250' (1st paragraph after the charts)
  • Skiprudder - Tuesday, October 13, 2009 - link

    Thanks for the review!

    I guess I'm rather surprised at the 5770 results being consistently lower than the 4870 as well, and would be interested in a a bit more hypothesizing as to why exactly this is the case when the stats on the cards suggest they should be at minimum roughly equivalent. Is this situation the sort of thing that might see large changes with updated versions of Catalyst?

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