Sapphire Radeon HD 5750

[PAGETITLE=Introduction][Top Ad] 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 58x0 for each respective model). 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 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). [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 (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. F.E.A.R. 2: Project Origin. Grand Theft Auto IV. Race Driver: GRID. World in Conflict: Soviet Assault. [PAGEBREAK][PAGETITLE=Call of Duty: Modern Warfare 2] When the original Call of Duty game launched in 2003, Infinity Ward was an unknown. Naturally... it was the company's first title. But since then, the series and company alike have become household names. Not only has the series delivered consistently incredible gameplay, it's pushed the graphics envelope with each successive release, and where Modern Warfare is concerned, it's also had a rich storyline. The first two titles might have been built on the already-outdated Quake III engine, but since then, the games have been built with improved graphical features, capable of pushing the highest-end PCs out there. Modern Warfare 2 is the first such exception, as it's more of a console port than a true PC...

Sapphire Radeon HD 5750

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Rob Williams