Sapphire ATI Radeon HD5770 graphics card

This Radeon graphics card supports DirectX 11

PC World Australia (online)

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The Sapphire ATI Radeon HD5770 is a midrange graphics card with a core speed of 850MHz and a memory clock speed of 2.2GHz. It has 1.36 teraFLOPS of processing power. The graphics processing unit (GPU) has 1GB of GDDR5 onboard memory with a data rate of 4.8 gigabits per second.

Pros

  • Excellent performance results

Cons

  • Random outbursts of noise, large

Bottom Line

Despite random outbursts of noise and a large build, the HD5770 will not disappoint when push comes to shove.

Would you buy this?

  • Price

    $ 225.00 (AUD)

The ATI Radeon HD5770 has one of the first GPUs to support DirectX 11, which makes it ideal for next-generation PC gaming while also enhancing the quality of current-gen games. (Enthusiasts who plan to purchase the Radeon HD5770 may also want to look into the range of DirectX 11 compatible games soon to be released, including Aliens vs. Predator and Battleforge.) The card has an idle board power of 18 Watts. When running at maximum power it has a total power consumption of 108W — 72W less than the ATI Radeon HD5870.

Unsurprisingly, the HD5770 is quite large, measuring 220x90x35mm. Nevertheless, it is still 50mm shorter than the HD5870. The GPU has reasonably low fan noise, although when the card needed to work particularly hard there was a sudden 2-3 second burst of noise that would erupt from the fan. It’s not noisy enough to spoil your gaming experience but it may prove annoying while rendering HD videos and the like.

The Radeon HD5770 produced quite impressive results in our performance tests. Our testbed PC was running a 64-bit version of Vista with an Intel Core i7 695, 6GB of DDR3 RAM and a Western Digital VelociRaptor (WD3000GLFS) hard drive.

When testing the GPU using Futuremark’s 3DMARK Vantage benchmark, it scored a ‘Performance’ score of P6803 and an ‘Extreme’ score of X3223 — this is a slight drop compared to the ATI Radeon HD5870, which scored P12000 and X9000, respectively. The Radeon HD5770 acquitted itself pretty well during our DirectX 10 gaming tests. When we tested the Sapphire card using Far Cry 2, it averaged an impressive 89.55 frames per second (fps), compared to 49.38fps from the the Manli ATI Radeon HD4890. However, when we ran Call of Juarez, the HD5770 scored an average frame rate of 43.6fps; significantly slower than Manli graphics card, which averaged 57.4fps.

The ATI Radeon HD5770 completely owned the DirectX 9 version of Half Life 2: Episode 2, with a frame rate of 138.10fps. Despite its commendable performance, it was still an inch slower than Manli’s Radeon, which managed 140.11fps.

To make the most of the card, a screen which supports a 1920x1200 resolution is ideal. The HD5770 is able to run 3 separate displays simultaneously for multi-screen gaming (each screen can show something different opposed to having three monitors displaying the same graphics).

For a graphics card that only has one processor, the ATI Radeon HD5770 performs particularly well and it has quite low power consumption. For gaming enthusiasts who wish to have top-end performance at a reasonable price, this Sapphire ATI RADEON HD5770 should not be overlooked.

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