AMD’s Radeon HD 5770 & 5750: DirectX 11 for the Mainstream Crowd
by Ryan Smith on October 13, 2009 12:00 AM EST- Posted in
- GPUs
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 |
Video Drivers: |
NVIDIA ForceWare 190.62 |
OS: | Windows 7 Ultimate 64-bit |
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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?