Item: Mid-range machinations: AMD's Sapphire Radeon HD 5770 and HD 5750 GPUs
Author: Tarinder Sandhu

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

Rating, awards, HEXUS.right2reply, HEXUS.where2buy

HEXUS Rating

We consider any product score above '50%' as a safe buy. The higher the score, the higher the recommendation from HEXUS to buy. Simple, straightforward buying advice.

The rating is given in relation to the category the component competes in, therefore the AMD Radeon HD 5770 and HD 5750 1,024MB GPUs are evaluated with respect to our 'mid-range and high-end components' criteria.

AMD ATI Radeon HD 5770 1,024MB (at in-stock price of £115)

AMD ATI Radeon HD 5750 1,024MB (at in-stock price of £109)

HEXUS Awards

AMD ATI Radeon HD 5770 and HD 5750 1,024MB

HEXUS Where2Buy

AMD ATI Radeon HD 5770 and ATI Radeon HD 5750 graphics cards can be ordered now from the following retailers

	As always, UK-based HEXUS.community discussion forum members will benefit from the SCAN2HEXUS Free Shipping initiative, which will save you a further few pounds plus also top-notch, priority customer service and technical support backed up by the SCANcare@HEXUS forum.
SCAN.co.uk	Radeon HD 5770 - prices start at £131.40 Radeon HD 5750 - prices start at £114.45

CCLonline.com	Radeon HD 5770 - prices start at £127.12 Radeon HD 5750 - prices start at £111.94
Dabs.com	Radeon HD 5770 - prices start at £129.95 Radeon HD 5750 - prices start at £109.99
Ebuyer.com	Radeon HD 5770 - prices start at £111.28 Radeon HD 5750 - prices start at £92.36
Novatech.co.uk	Radeon HD 5770 - prices start at £132.24 Radeon HD 5750 - prices start at £114.99

Play.com	Radeon HD 5770 - prices start at £144.99 Radeon HD 5750 - prices start at £124.99

HEXUS Right2Reply

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You mention in the conclusion that we're paying for features rather than performance. How much is that power draw worth? Many have complained for a while about the astronomical power draw from GPUs, and finally we are seeing AMD actually deliver decent performance per Watt.

Let's just hope that all these horror stories we're hearing in the rumour mill about NVidia aren't true. I applaud AMD for delivering a range of GPUs when they don't really need too!

Nice cards, and review!

I think you make an interesting point about the bandwidth - while they are behind the 4870 at 1920x, look at the 2560(?) resolution and they leap ahead - the extra framebuffer more than making up for the reduced bandwidth. I suspect that actually they are more ROP limited than bandwitdh, even with the 128bit bus, which just shows how fast that DDR5 is. AMD made a very clever decision to save die space with the narrower bus, and if nVidia bloat their die with a larger bus they'll get mega bandwitdh numbers.. but without any real world benefit.

I was also surprised just how often the 5770 beats or equals the 260 - it must be a fraction of the cost to produce, so the possible dissappearance of the 260 from the market suddenly makes more sense. AMD margins look really healthy (wish we could say the same for their CPU chips) and they've got the room to respond in price should they have to. As it is they're still good value for money, even at inflated launch prices!

Was the 4870 a 512MB card, as reported during the benchmarks, or a 1GB card, as show in the bang4buck grid ? If it was a 512MB card, was it being benchmarked so as to provide a direct comparison to the GTS 250 rather than as a part of the ATI 1GB lineup ?
It does seem that the 4870 and 4890 are being under-priced by vendors attempting to shift stock and, right now, might be worth picking up over AMD's new 57x0 line.

It's a 512MB card. I should have made that clearer.

We tried to find the best ~£100 ATI card on the market, irrespective of architecture, and the HD 4870 512MB was it. That's why it was included.

What were the noise levels like?