AMD’s HD 5550 & 5570 – Now Equipped with GDDR5 Goodness

[PAGETITLE=Introduction][Top Ad] In the early months of 2010, it became clear that AMD had the intention of not just painting the town red, but keeping it that way for a while. It accomplished this with not just one GPU launch, and not even two... but five, spanning across a month and a half. Of these, most were budget models, from the Radeon HD 5450 up to the HD 5670; the exception being the mainstream HD 5830. On February 9th in particular, AMD launched the HD 5550 and HD 5570, also known as Redwood LE and PRO, respectively. At that time, the HD 5570 seemed to be the main focus, because for months past that launch, I had forgotten all about the HD 5550. In a rarity, AMD didn't send out samples for that model, so it itself didn't seem to value the card that highly. Last month, I took a look at Sapphire's version of the card, dubbed "Ultimate", and I could begin to understand the reason AMD kept so quiet on it. The card for the most part wasn't that bad from a performance standpoint, but when a card that costs about $20 more is about twice as fast, it makes you scratch your head with regards to its existence. Closer Look. Things changed a little bit a couple of weeks ago, though, when AMD came to us and said that it would be upgrading both the HD 5550 and HD 5570 to use GDDR5 memory in lieu of the DDR2 and DDR3 the cards were equipped with before. It's clear to me from personal tests in the past that faster and more efficient memory on a graphics card can make a sizable difference, but its more so an issue on budget cards, as mainstream cards generally already use the best memory available. The big question of course is whether or not upgrading a sub-$100 GPU to GDDR5 is worth the added expense. After all, I didn't recommend the original HD 5550 given it was priced just $10 - $15 lower than the HD 5570, but was much slower. And as the cards are "budget", it's hard to pack in all this top-end technology and keep things that way. According to AMD, the pricing for the updated cards isn't going to change from current market values, so that's reassuring. This could have been made possible due to GDDR5 price-drops, or the fact that AMD is only packing in 512MB of the stuff, compared to the usually-included 1GB. On budget cards, 1GB is very rarely ever touched, so the move to less but much faster memory is a no-brainer. With the quoted pricing, it puts the HD 5550 at about $75 - $80 and the HD 5570 at $80 - $90. As far as I'm concerned, both of these are still a hard sell with the much-faster HD 5670 at $100, but that's something we'll tackle in the conclusion. For those looking to pick up either of these two models, the introduction of GDDR5 is a great thing, even if the performance increase is minimal (hint: it isn't), thanks to the fact that pricing isn't supposed to budge. With GDDR5, the memory speeds for both cards increases also, which I've reflected in our model round-up table below: Model Core MHz Mem MHz Memory Bus Width Processors Radeon HD 5970 725 1000 2048MB 256-bit 1600 x 2 Radeon HD 5870 Eyefinity 6 850 1200 1024MB 256-bit 1600 Radeon HD 5870 850 1200 1024MB 256-bit 1600 Radeon HD 5850 725 1000 1024MB 256-bit 1440 Radeon HD 5830 800 1000 1024MB 256-bit 1120 Radeon HD 5770 850 1200 1024MB 128-bit 800 Radeon HD 5750 700 1150 512MB - 1GB 128-bit 720 Radeon HD 5670 775 1000 512MB - 1GB 128-bit 400 Radeon HD 5570 (GDDR5) 650 1000 512MB - 1GB 128-bit 400 Radeon HD 5570 650 900 512MB - 1GB 128-bit 400 Radeon HD 5550 (GDDR5) 550 1000 512MB - 1GB 128-bit 320 Radeon HD 5550 550 800 512MB - 1GB 128-bit 320 Radeon HD 5450 650 800 512MB - 1GB 64-bit 80 As you can see, there are no differences in core clock speeds between the old and the new, but the memory of course has seen a healthy bump, especially on the HD 5550. Both of the cards use the exact same GDDR5 and exact same speeds, and while I'm on this "exact same" kick, let's take a look at the cards we were given, straight from AMD: The fact that the HD 5550 and HD 5570 were close in design was never a question, but to receive both models looking 99.99% the same was kind of humorous. The absolutely only difference between the two cards was the model code on the back, and it's not even a human-readable one, so these were like receiving a CPU that had its IHS printing rubbed out. Fun stuff! A shot of both the GPU itself and GDDR5 IC's can be seen in the photo below, and is pretty self-explanatory: The samples we were sent are those of reference design, so vendors that sell AMD's cards don't have to stick to them, but can use them as a guideline. Regardless, since I had the cooler off anyway, I took a picture to help show it off. As you'd expect of a budget card, the cooler is rather uneventful, but to be fair, that's fine. These cards don't get that hot to begin with, so anything bigger or better would just tack on needless dollars to the price. Along with this launch, AMD is again stressing the importance of its STREAM technology, especially with commercial applications such as CyberLink MediaShow and ArcSoft MediaConverter, but we're not going to touch on any of that here. Testing with those applications is something I'm long overdue for, so I plan to test them out, along with others, and dedicate a special article to them. If you have any suggestions of other things to include in such an article, please feel free to let me know. With our look at the updated cards out of the way, we can move right into testing. Well, after a look at our testing methodologies, of course. [PAGEBREAK][PAGETITLE=Test System & Methodology] At Techgage, we strive to make sure our results are as accurate as possible. Our testing is rigorous and time-consuming, but we feel the effort is worth it. In an attempt to leave no question unanswered, this page contains not only our testbed specifications, but also a fully-detailed look at how we conduct our testing. For an exhaustive look at our methodologies, even down to the Windows Vista installation, please refer to this article. Test Machine. The below table lists our testing machine's hardware, which remains unchanged throughout all GPU testing, minus the graphics card. Each card used for comparison is also listed here, along with the driver version used. Each one of the URLs in this table can be clicked to view the respective review of that product, or if a review doesn't exist, it will bring you to the product on the manufacturer's website. Component Model Processor Intel Core i7-975 Extreme Edition - Quad-Core, 3.33GHz, 1.33v Motherboard Gigabyte GA-EX58-EXTREME - X58-based, F7 BIOS (05/11/09) Memory Corsair DOMINATOR - DDR3-1333 7-7-7-24-1T, 1.60 ATI Graphics Radeon HD 5870 1GB (Reference) - Catalyst 10.3 Radeon HD 5850 1GB (Sapphire Toxic) - Catalyst 10.2 Radeon HD 5850 1GB (ASUS) - Catalyst 9.10 Radeon HD 5830 1GB (Reference) - Beta Catalyst (02/10/10) Radeon HD 5770 1GB (Reference) - Beta Catalyst (10/06/09) Radeon HD 5750 1GB (Sapphire) - Catalyst 9.11 Radeon HD 5670 512MB (Reference) - Beta Catalyst (12/16/09) Radeon HD 5570 512MB GDDR5 (Reference) - Catalyst 10.6 Radeon HD 5570 1GB (Sapphire) - Catalyst 10.6 Radeon HD 5550 512MB GDDR5 (Reference) - Catalyst 10.6 Radeon HD 5550 1GB (Sapphire) - Catalyst 10.6 NVIDIA Graphics GeForce GTX 480 1536MB (Reference) - GeForce 197.17 GeForce GTX 295 1792MB (Reference) - GeForce 186.18 GeForce GTX 285 1GB (EVGA) - GeForce 186.18 GeForce GTX 275 896MB (Reference) - GeForce 186.18 GeForce GTX 260 896MB (XFX) - GeForce 186.18 GeForce GTS 250 1GB (EVGA) - GeForce 186.18 GeForce GT 240 512MB (ASUS) - GeForce 196.21 Audio On-Board Audio Storage Seagate Barracuda 500GB 7200.11 Power Supply Corsair HX1000W Chassis SilverStone TJ10 Full-Tower Display Gateway XHD3000 30" Cooling Thermalright TRUE Black 120 Et cetera Windows Vista Ultimate 64-bit When preparing our testbeds for any type of performance testing, we follow these guidelines: General Guidelines No power-saving options are enabled in the motherboard's BIOS. Internet is disabled. No Virus Scanner or Firewall is installed. The OS is kept clean; no scrap files are left in between runs. Hard drives affected are defragged with PerfectDisk 10 prior to a fresh benchmarking run. Machine has proper airflow and the room temperature is 80°F (27°C) or less. To aide with the goal of keeping accurate and repeatable results, we alter certain services in Windows Vista from starting up at boot. This is due to the fact that these services have the tendency to start up in the background without notice, potentially causing slightly inaccurate results. Disabling "Windows Search" turns off the OS' indexing which can at times utilize the hard drive and memory more than we'd like. Services Disabled Prior to Benchmarking PerfectDisk 10. Windows Defender. Windows Error Reporting Service. Windows Event Log. Windows Firewall. Windows Search. Windows Update. For more robust information on how we tweak Windows, please refer once again to this article. Game Titles. At this time, we currently benchmark all of our games using three popular resolutions: 1680x1050, 1920x1080 and also 2560x1600. 1680x1050 was chosen as it's one of the most popular resolutions for gamers sporting ~20" displays. 1920x1080 might stand out, since we've always used 1920x1200 in the past, but we didn't make this change without some serious thought. After taking a look at the current landscape for desktop monitors around ~24", we noticed that 1920x1200 is definitely on the way out, as more and more models are coming out as native 1080p. It's for this reason that we chose it. Finally, for high-end gamers, we also benchmark using 2560x1600, a resolution that's just about 2x 1080p. For graphics cards that include less than 1GB of GDDR, we omit Grand Theft Auto IV from our testing, as our chosen detail settings require at least 800MB of available graphics memory. Also, if the card we're benchmarking doesn't offer the performance to handle 2560x1600 across most of our titles reliably, only...

AMD’s HD 5550 & 5570 – Now Equipped with GDDR5 Goodness

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Rob Williams