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Review: Mid-range machinations: AMD's Sapphire Radeon HD 5770 and HD 5750 GPUs

by Tarinder Sandhu on 13 October 2009, 05:00 4.0

Tags: Radeon HD 5750, Win 7 - Radeon HD 5770 1GB, AMD (NYSE:AMD), Sapphire, ATi Technologies (NYSE:AMD)

Quick Link: HEXUS.net/qauf6

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HEXUS.bang4buck and overclocking

In a rough-and-ready assessment of the cards' bang for buck, we've aggregated the 1,920x1,200 and 2,560x1,600 frame-rates for five games, excluding card-bashing Crysis, normalised them* and taken account of the cards' prices.

But there are more provisos than we'd care to shake a stick at. We could have chosen five different games, the cards' prices could have been derived from other sources and pricing tends to fluctuate daily.

Consequently, the tables, below, highlight a metric that should only be used as a yardstick for evaluating comparative performance with price factored in. Other architectural benefits are not covered, obviously.

HEXUS.bang4buck at 1,920x1,200

Graphics cards ATI Radeon HD 5870
1,024MB
ATI Radeon HD 5850
1,024MB
Sapphire Radeon HD 4890
1,024MB 
Sapphire Radeon HD 4870 
512MB
Sapphire Radeon HD 5770 
1,024MB
Sapphire Radeon HD 5750 
1,024MB
BFG GeForce GTX 295
1,792MB
BFG GeForce GTX 285
1,024MB
XFX GeForce GTX 275
896MB 
XFX GeForce GTX 260
896MB
XFX GeForce GTS 250
512MB
Average frame-rate at 1,920x1,200 (inc. Crysis) 91.82
76.92
68.84
56.88 52.97
44.76
100.45
70.37
65.58
56.83
43.11
Actual aggregate marks at 1,920x1,200 524.80 439.41 393.60 322.29 302.79 255.95 578.90 404.15 377.17 326.81 250.66
Aggregate marks, normalised*, at 1,920x1,200 412.40 369.73
345.66 282.38 274.81
233.47
439.45
342.71
325.25 285.44
218.01
Current pricing, including VAT £299
£199
£150
£109 £125 £99
£346 £240 £160
£128 £95
HEXUS.bang4buck score at 1,920x1,200 1.380 1.858 2.304 2.585 2.198 2.358 1.270 1.428
2.033
2.23
2.295

* the normalisation refers to taking playable frame rate into account. Should a card benchmark at over 60 frames per second in any one game, the extra fps count as half. Similarly, should a card benchmark lower, say at 40fps, we deduct half the difference from its average frame rate and the desired 60fps, giving it a HEXUS.bang4buck score of 30 marks. The minimum allowable frame rate is 20fps but that scores zero.

The HEXUS.bang4buck score only takes the performance and price into account, of course.

Analysis

Summarising what's been shown in the benchmarks, the mid-range 5-series cards' performance, whilst undeniably decent, isn't quite as good as the price-ravaged Radeon HD 4870. Any card scoring a HEXUS.bang4buck metric of over 2 can be thought of as providing value, but this notion should be tempered by also looking at the average fps achieved when taking the six games into account.

Purchases of modern cards should be based on more than just pixel-pushing performance, we feel, and we'll tie it all up in the conclusion.

Overclocking

Our Radeon HD 5770 sample stubbornly refused to overclock any higher than the 850MHz core. Memory speed fared much better, rising from 4,800MHz to 5,620MHz. The additional headroom gave an extra 4.4 per cent performance across the games.

Radeon HD 5750's overclocking was better, jumping from 700MHz/4,600MHz to 770MHz/5,700MHz, leading to an 11.6 per cent increase across the games.