ONE STOP IT News, Rumour & Review: Review The AMD Radeon HD 5770, Rulling the Mainstream

source: hardwarezone.com

Juniper Arrives

ATI's latest generation 5000 series cards were launched to great success late last month. If you haven't checked out our review of the awesome Radeon HD 5870 , then the short story is this: the new HD 5870 is the world's fastest single GPU. But what is perhaps more impressive is that it delivers such phenomenal performance with power consumption figures that are less than the previous generation of high-end cards. That's a very big leap in performance per watt improvement in the high-end space.

Although retail-ready samples of NVIDIA's GT300 cards are no where to be seen, they have, however, unveiled the "Fermi" architecture that will be powering the GT300 class cards at the recently concluded GPU Technology Conference held at San Jose, California. On top of that, they have followed up by making the GeForce GT 220, a budget-class graphics card that was initially made available only to OEMs, now available for purchase to the public.

Clearly the cogs of the graphics war machine are turning, and ATI is building on the success of the 5800 series with the upper mainstream class of the 5700 series, specifically the Radeon HD 5770 that we have here today. In accordance with ATI's new nomenclature, the new Radeon HD 5770 (previously codenamed Juniper XT), is a stripped down version of the powerful Radeon HD 5870. While the 5870 possess 1600 stream processors, the 5770 makes do with half that number. It also gets a narrower 128-bit wide memory bus, but retains the use of GDDR5 memory and has core and memory clock speeds of 850MHz and 4800MHz DDR respectively.

So on paper at least, it still looks as if it'll be a pretty quick card and should be prove to be a tough fight for perhaps the more established Radeon HD 4870. The new Radeon HD 5770 has the same number of stream processors, but trumps the older HD 4870 with more texture mapping units and raster operator units. The exact numbers are detailed in the table below and this should probably give the newcomer better anti-aliasing performance. However, it loses out to the Radeon HD 4870 on memory bandwidth, no thanks to its narrower 128-bit memory bus interface as with many other mainstream range graphics cards of the past. This difference could prove to be critical in our testing outcome of whether the new mainstream card can oust the former top ATI card. The two are therefore somewhat evenly matched and comparisons between them should be interesting.

Paper specifications aside, the Radeon HD 5770 will also support ATI's Eyefinity technology, which means these cards can power up to three monitors simultaneously by either using a combination of a DVI, HDMI and DisplayPort, or two DVI ports and a DisplayPort.

Before we begin the review proper with cards from both PowerColor and HIS, here's how the new Radeon HD 5770 stacks up against other competitive SKUs.

GPU-Z has identification problems with some aspects of the Radeon HD 5770.

The ATI Radeon HD 5770 and competitive SKUs

Model	ATI Radeon HD 5770 1GB	ATI Radeon HD 4890 1GB	ATI Radeon HD 4870 512MB	ATI Radeon HD 4850 512MB	NVIDIA GeForce GTX 275 896MB	NVIDIA GeForce GTX 260+ 896MB
Core Code	Juniper XT	RV790	RV770	RV770	GT200	GT200
Transistor Count	Unknown	965 million	965 million	965 million	1400 million	1400 million
Manufacturing Process	40nm	55nm	55nm	55nm	55nm	65nm
Core Clock	850MHz	850MHz	750MHz	625MHz	633MHz	576MHz
Stream Processors	800 Stream processing units	800 Stream processing units	800 Stream processing units	800 Stream processing units	240 Stream Processors	216 Stream Processors
Stream Processor Clock	850MHz	850MHz	750MHz	625MHz	1404MHz	1242MHz
Texture Mapping Units (TMU) or Texture Filtering (TF) units	56	40	40	40	80	72
Raster Operator units (ROP)	24	16	16	16	28	28
Memory Clock	4800MHz GDDR5	3900MHz GDDR5	3600MHz GDDR5	2000MHz GDDR3	2268MHz DDR	1998MHz DDR
DDR Memory Bus	128-bit	256-bit	256-bit	256-bit	448-bit	448-bit
Memory Bandwidth	76.8GB/s	124.8GB/s	115.2GB/s	64GB/s	130.4GB/s	111.9GB/s
PCI Express Interface	PCIe ver 2.0 x16	PCIe ver 2.0 x16	PCIe ver 2.0 x16	PCIe ver 2.0 x16	PCIe ver 2.0 x16	PCIe ver 2.0 x16
Molex Power Connectors	1 x 6-pin	2 x 6-pin	2 x 6-pin	6-pin	2 x 6-pin	2 x 6-pin
Multi GPU Technology	CrossFireX	CrossFireX	CrossFireX	CrossFireX	SLI	SLI
DVI Output Support	2 x Dual-Link	2 x Dual-Link	2 x Dual-Link	2 x Dual-Link	2 x Dual-Link	2 x Dual-Link
HDCP Output Support	Yes	Yes	Yes	Yes	Yes	Yes
Street Price	~US$159	~US$200	~US$150	~US$100	~US$230	~US$200

The HIS Radeon HD 5770

As is the case with early releases, the HIS Radeon HD 5770 comes with ATI's reference cooler and PCB design. The design of the cooler follows that of the Radeon HD 5870, with two vents at the top end which helps suck in cool air to blow over the core. The HIS card also has ATI's reference clock speeds, which means 850MHz at the core and 4800 MHz DDR at the memory.

The HIS Radeon HD 5770 comes bundled with a free copy of Dirt 2, which can be redeemed when the game is released in December later this year.

The HIS card comes with ATI's reference cooler and PCB design.

The PowerColor Radeon HD 5770

Like the HIS card, the PowerColor Radeon HD 5770 also sports ATI's reference cooler and PCB design. As such, the two cards look identical except for the stickers which the respective vendors have pasted on them. Expect performance to be the same too, because the PowerColor Radeon HD 5770 also sports ATI's reference clock speeds.

The PowerColor Radeon HD 5770 comes in a nice compact package, and the cover features their new warrior mascot.

The PowerColor features ATI's reference designs, and as such, looks exactly identical to HIS's offering.

Here's what else you can expect from reference design Radeon HD 5770 cards:

The Radeon HD 5770 features ATI's Eyefinity technology and comes with two DVI, a single HDMI port and a DisplayPort. It can drive up to three monitors with the DisplayPort and any combination of DVI and HDMI ports.

The Radeon HD 5770 requires a single 6-pin PCIe power connector. It is hidden in the vents under the cooler casing.

The two card are using Hynix H5GQ1H24AFR GDDR5 memory which are capable of 7 GigaTransfers/second.

Test Setup

The two cards will be put through its paces using our trusty Windows Vista, Intel X38 based system:

Windows Vista SP1 Test System:

Intel Core 2 Extreme QX6850 (3.00GHz)
Gigabyte X38T-DQ6 motherboard
2 x 1GB DDR3-1333 Aeneon memory in dual channel mode
Seagate 7200.10 200GB SATA hard drive
Windows Vista Ultimate with SP1

Judging from the paper specifications of the new Radeon HD 5770, we suspect its performance will be comparable to that of the Radeon HD 4870, so we'll be looking at these cards closely. On top of that, we have also added ATI's previous most powerful card, the HD 4890 to see if the HD 5770 could possibly surpass it. And from the green camp, we have the GeForce GTX 275 and GTX 260+.

Here's the complete list of cards tested and the driver versions used:

HIS Radeon HD 5770 1GB GDDR5 (Beta 8.66 RC9)
PowerColor Radeon HD 5770 1GB GDDR5 (Beta 8.66 RC9)
ATI Radeon HD 4890 1GB GDDR5 (Catalyst 9.8)
ATI Radeon HD 4870 1GB GDDR5 (Catalyst 9.8)
ATI Radeon HD 4850 512MB GDDR3 (Catalyst 9.8)
NVIDIA GeForce GTX 275 896MB GDDR3 (ForceWare 190.62)
NVIDIA GeForce GTX 260+ 896MB GDDr3 (ForceWare 190.62)

The cards were tested using the following benchmarks:

Futuremark 3DMark06
Futuremark 3DMark Vantage
Crysis Warhead
Far Cry 2
Dawn of War 2

3DMark06 Results

We begin our analysis of the Radeon HD 5770 on 3DMark06, an old but still widely used benchmarking software.

The Radeon HD 5770 scored slightly lower than a Radeon HD 4890, and was almost on par with the Radeon HD 4870. Against the cards from the green camp, it was a match for the 216 core variant of the GeForce GTX 260, but the might of the more powerful GeForce GTX 275 was too much to take.

Also, given that the two Radeon HD 5770 cards have identical clock speeds, it was not surprising that they recorded scores that were nearly identical.

3DMark Vantage Results

Here again in 3DMark Vantage, the Radeon HD 5770 fared on par with the Radeon HD 4870. However it was slightly disappointing to find that the two NVIDIA cards as well the Radeon HD 4890 outscored both our Radeon HD 5770 cards.

Crysis Warhead and Far Cry 2 Results

Hoping that the Radeon HD 5770 would redeem itself on real world gaming applications, we move on to Crysis Warhead. Again, the Radeon HD 5770 was a little underwhelming. We can see from the graphs distinctly, that it was it is a notch slower than the Radeon HD 4870 1GB editions, which denote the impact of the reduced memory bandwidth.

We also noted that the two NVIDIA cards were faster. The NVIDIA GeForce GTX 260+, rival to the Radeon HD 4870, was about 10% quicker than the Radeon HD 5770.

On Far Cry 2, the Radeon HD 5770 was just about as quick as the Radeon HD 4870, with both the newcomers recording results that were nearly identical to those achieved by the Radeon HD 4870.

The dominance of the two NVIDIA cards didn't go unnoticed either with even the GeForce GTX 260+ outperforming the Radeon HD 4890 on the more demanding settings in this benchmark.

Dawn of War 2 Results

The two Radeon HD 5770 cards began brightly on Dawn of War 2, holding its own against the Radeon HD 4870 while outperforming the Radeon HD 4890 and even both NVIDIA cards. However, its performance dipped considerably as we increased the resolution - again a trait related to its limited memory bandwidth. At the highest resolution of 1920 x 1440, we noticed that the Radeon HD 5770 was only slightly faster than a Radeon HD 4850.

Temperature

While its performance thus far might be just a tad disappointing, its operating temperature of 68 degrees Celsius is actually quite commendable given that the Radeon HD 4870, its closest match, recording a lava-hot 84 degrees Celsius. In fact, as the graph shows, it is the coolest card here of the competitive comparison.

Power Consumption

As the graph shows, power consumption figures of the new Radeon HD 5770 is excellent. They were by far the most power efficient cards, with idle and peak recordings lower than even the Radeon HD 4850. In fact, the Radeon HD 5770's power consumption figures rival that of a GeForce 9800 GT. Of all the cards here, the Radeon HD 5770 is without doubt the one offering the best performance per watt ratio.

Overclocking

We had mixed results with the two Radeon HD 5770 cards. On the PowerColor card, we could only manage a conservative 900MHz at the core and 5200 MHz DDR at the memory before the card could no longer work reliably. This gave us 4514 3DMarks, a 5% improvement in performance.

On the HIS Radeon HD 5770, however, we managed to achieve 960MHz at the core (the highest ATI Overdrive would allow us) and a stratospheric 5520MHz DDR at the memory. On the Extreme preset, this gave us 4730 3DMarks, representing a remarkable 12% improvement in performance, on par with the Radeon HD 4890.

In light of these two contrasting results, it is difficult to comment on the willingness of the Radeon HD 5770 to overclock, but there is some room no doubt.

Almost Fantastic...

Perhaps we were expecting too much, but the Radeon HD 5770 was a little underwhelming in our books. Where performance is concerned, we expected it to be positioned in between the Radeon HD 4890 and HD 4870, but our tests have shown that it was mostly a smidge lower than the HD 4870 1GB editions; which puts it closer to the 512MB edition of the Radeon HD 4870. The Radeon HD 5770 was also no match for NVIDIA's GeForce GTX 275 and GTX 260+.

The results seem to indicate the shortcoming of the 128-bit memory bus that the 'mainstream' Radeon HD 5770 possesses. In fact, we were perplexed as to why the Radeon HD 5770 didn't receive a 256-bit wide memory bus like the Radeon HD 4870 did. Perhaps that's still the same silver lining that divides the mainstream from high-end graphics cards as has been the case for several years now. All things equal, we think that a memory bus upgrade would allow the Radeon HD 5770 to convincingly outperform the Radeon HD 4870.

However, while the Radeon HD 5770 might lack the firepower to take on the big boys, it does have a couple of other things going for it. For one, it runs relatively cool even on a stock cooler and it has by far the best power consumption figures, which makes it energy efficient - something which the environmentally conscious should take note of.

So think of the new Radeon HD 5770 somewhat as a revised HD 4870 card that is much more environmentally friendly. Not to forget that it fully supports DirectX 11, which should come in handy as more DirectX 11 games slowly creep in to the market next year. Furthermore, it also boasts ATI's EyeFinity technology, which makes a triple monitor setup a possibility.

Both cards are priced similarly at US$159 and with both performing identically in our tests, the only difference is that the HIS card comes bundled with Dirt 2, and that's an added plus.

ATI has stated that the Radeon HD 5770 will go sale for about US$159 and that's just about right we feel considering that the older Radeon HD 4870 is also going for around that price at the moment. Locally, US$159 translates to S$222 and that sounds like a good price for the card if you take into account that older HD 4870 cards are still commanding quite a premium (~S$260) here on our sunny island.

The Radeon HD 5770 is not quite the smash hit that the Radeon HD 5870 was. Although it did well in the efficiency department where operating temperatures and power consumption is concerned, but it left us wanting more in terms of sheer graphics horsepower. ATI should have given it a 256-bit memory bus, or at least price it a tad lower to make it even more enticing. Right now, the Radeon HD 5770 feels like an updated version of the Radeon HD 4870, with added DirectX 11 support, EyeFinity, and better thermal and power management. It's no doubt a good effort by ATI, but it just didn't blow our socks off.

Final Ratings