Sapphire Radeon HD 5750

Over the course of the past two months, AMD has launched five different models as part of its HD 5000 series. The company kicked things off with its higher-end HD 5850 and HD 5870 cards, which simply put, reaffirmed the fact that the roaring success of the HD 4000 series wasn’t going to be the last. Just last week, AMD ushered in the launch of its first dual-GPU card as part of the HD 5000 series, the HD 5970, and it’s mind-bogglingly fast, especially when compared to NVIDIA’s current offerings.

While high-end cards are all fine and good for those who need the kind of powered offered, there exists an even stronger market for lower-end components, and that’s where the HD 5770 and HD 5750 come into play. I took a look at the former about a month ago, and was impressed with the overall value. No matter how you looked at it, the card offered fantastic performance, a lower power consumption (and lower temps as a result), along with such perks as DirectX 11. There wasn’t a single aspect not to like – well, except for the overclocking potential.

With this article, we’re rounding out our content of AMD’s latest single-GPU cards, with a review of its dual-GPU HD 5970 to be posted within the next couple of weeks. As mentioned before, the HD 5750 launched at the same time as the HD 5770, and both are targeting the crowd of people who want acceptable gaming performance without breaking their budget. At the suggested retail price of $129 ($109 for the 512MB version), it’s undeniably affordable, but do better options exist?

Closer Look

Like the other members of the HD 5000 series, the HD 5750 is built upon a 40nm process, which is a nice improvement over the 55nm process of the previous generation. As a result of this shrink, and other architecture enhancements, AMD has seemingly mastered the art of building graphics cards that are much more power efficient, and we’ve seen this with each HD 5000 series card we’ve taken a look at up to this point.

In addition, the HD 5750, though a “budget” offering, lacks nothing of what makes the HD 5000 series so great. That means there’s full support for DirectX 11, Eyefinity (multi-monitor), multiple video outputs and so forth. From a features standpoint, it’s all here. What’s lacking is of course the incredible performance of the larger cards. Both the HD 5750 and HD 5770 have had their memory bus downgraded to 128-bit, while at the same time, they lose a substantial number of shader cores (exactly half of the 58×0 for each respective model).

At $109 for the 512MB version, and $129 for the 1GB version, the HD 5750 is without a doubt, a card designed for those who want performance far beyond what an integrated chip could offer, but doesn’t cost an arm and a leg. The HD 5750 is capable of delivering on all fronts in that regard. As you can see below, Sapphire changes things up from the reference design just a wee bit. the board itself is identical, but the cooler is a little more robust, with a larger heatsink base.

One common feature you can expect to see across almost all of the HD 5000 series cards are the connections found at the back which include 2 x DVI, 1x DisplayPort and 1x HDMI. The only thing lacking is VGA (understandably so), but if you are stuck with this ancient option, an adapter is found in the box.

The HD 5750, regardless of which vendor produces it, is simple in almost all regards. It has a simple cooler, and a single PCI-E power connector. Still, it’s a card of this generation, which means it boasts some great things, all of which we covered above. Sapphire’s card, like many others, includes a voucher for a free copy of Dirt 2 in the box. So, if that’s a title you were planning to pick up anyway, the GPU will cost less in the end (if you want to look at it that way).