ATI Radeon HD 5770 CrossFireX Performance

[PAGETITLE=Introduction][Top Ad] This past October, AMD released the first follow-up cards to its Radeon HD 5000 launch models, the HD 5770 and HD 5750. As mid-range offerings, these cards came at a perfect time... mere weeks after the initial launch. While the HD 5870 and HD 5850 are without question the best performing cards on the market right now, not everyone wants to separate themselves from $300 - $400, so the $109 and $159 price tags of these new cards appealed to a much greater audience. As we discovered in our original review of the HD 5770 card, there's a lot to love here. Performance-wise, the card comes close to the performance of the HD 4870, which retailed for more than twice as much at its launch. But here, we have some notable additions, such as far improved power efficiency and lower temperatures, and of course new technologies like DirectX 11 and Eyefinity. In the end, although the HD 5770 performed a bit slower than the HD 4870, the perks outweighed that lone downside. If there's a major downside plaguing the HD 5000 series right now, it's the obvious lack of availability. Since the HD 5870 and HD 5850 launched, it's been a real chore for anyone who wants one to be able to purchase one. More often than not, the most popular e-tailers out there are out of stock, which is unfortunate. It's one thing release a product that blows people's minds, but it's another to actually allow the same people the ability to purchase them. As odd as it may be, both the HD 5750 and HD 5770 seem to be exempt from this issue, and since their launch, I haven't ever seen the cards out of stock. There are rumors that AMD and TSMC is having issues with the reliability of producing certain 40nm chips, and since we're seeing constant availability of the mid-range cards, it seems reasonable to believe that. After all, you'd imagine that yields when producing a ~1.04 million transistor chip would be better than producing chips with ~2.15 million. Whatever the issue, the lack of HD 5850 and HD 5870 cards raises an interesting question. Because there's ample supply of the HD 5770 cards, what about taking the CrossFireX route over holding out for the single-GPU HD 5870? If this configuration could even come close to the performance of an HD 5870, then it might actually work out better for gamers, since 2 x HD 5770 costs around ~$320, while a single HD 5870 is ~$400. As we published a proper review of the Radeon HD 5770 two months ago, I'm not going to rehash everything that was said there, but if you are curious to learn a bit more, I recommend checking back to that article, and page two in particular. There, we point out the differences between the HD 5870 and HD 5770, and for the most part, one is double the other. The primary difference is the slimmer memory bus, down to 128-bit from 256-bit. If there's one thing to keep our CrossFireX configuration of two HD 5770's from matching the HD 5870, that'd be it. Model Core MHz Mem MHz Memory Bus Width Processors Radeon HD 5970 725 1000 2048MB 256-bit 1600 x 2 Radeon HD 5870 850 1200 1024MB 256-bit 1600 Radeon HD 5850 725 1000 1024MB 256-bit 1440 Radeon HD 5770 850 1200 1024MB 128-bit 800 Radeon HD 5750 700 1150 512 - 1024MB 128-bit 720 Radeon HD 4890 850 - 900 975 1024MB 256-bit 800 Radeon HD 4870 750 900 512 - 2048MB 256-bit 800 Radeon HD 4850 625 993 512 - 1024MB 256-bit 800 Radeon HD 4770 750 800 512MB 128-bit 640 Radeon HD 4670 750 900 - 1100 512 - 1024MB 128-bit 320 Radeon HD 4650 600 400 - 500 512 - 1024MB 128-bit 320 For cards priced at ~$130 and higher, I personally think it'd be foolish to pick up an HD 4000 series card right now, unless you're able to get one at a great price. Some people don't weigh the perks quite as heavily as I do, and that's fine, but I am constantly impressed by the strides AMD made with its latest series. The power consumption is much improved, and so is the temperatures, and as mentioned above, there's things like DirectX 11 that will prove more important as time goes on. Before we dive into a look at our performance results, I should mention two potential downsides of going with a CrossFireX configuration over the single HD 5870. Because we're using two cards, the power consumption is naturally going to be higher, but it's not near as stark as you'd imagine, since as mentioned before, the HD 5870 is essentially 2x HD 5770 in terms of capabilities. The second potential issue is that with CrossFireX, the two cards are usually installed right beside each other, and as a result, temperatures of each card will be higher. It should never reach a point where it becomes unsafe, but if you have a cramped chassis, it's something to keep in mind. If you own a recent PC, chances are unlikely that you don't have a power supply to handle these two cards in CrossFireX, but in case not, AMD recommends at least a 600W unit that delivers 75W to each 6-pin PCI-E connector. Because each of these cards only require a single power plug, you don't need to worry about having an ultra-high-end model with four available connectors (a huge bonus). With that, let's take a quick look at our test setup and methodologies, and then move right into our results. [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 (Sapphire) - Catalyst 9.10 Radeon HD 5850 1GB (ASUS) - Catalyst 9.10 Radeon HD 5770 1GB CrossFireX (Reference) - Catalyst 9.11 Radeon HD 5770 1GB (Reference) - Beta Catalyst (10/06/09) Radeon HD 5750 1GB (Reference) - Catalyst 9.11 Radeon HD 4890 1GB (Sapphire) - Catalyst 9.8 Radeon HD 4870 1GB (Reference) - Catalyst 9.8 NVIDIA Graphics 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 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 1680x1050 and 1920x1080 will be utilized. Because we value results generated by real-world testing, we don't utilize timedemos whatsoever. The possible exception might be Futuremark's 3DMark Vantage. Though it's not a game, it essentially acts as a robust timedemo. We choose to use it as it's a standard where GPU reviews are concerned, and we don't want to rid our readers of results they expect to see. All of our results are captured with the help of Beepa's FRAPS 2.98, while stress-testing and temperature-monitoring is handled by OCCT 3.1.0 and GPU-Z, respectively. Call of Duty: Modern Warfare 2. Call of Juarez: Bound in Blood. Crysis Warhead...

ATI Radeon HD 5770 CrossFireX Performance

Page 676 –

Rob Williams