Reviews - Midrange machinations: AMD's Sapphire Radeon HD 5770 and HD 5750 GPUs

[HEXUS]

AMD releases Radeon HD 5770 and HD 5750 GPUs. Will they be on your Christmas shortlist? Read on to find out.

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[ajones]

You mention in the conclusion that we're paying for features rather than performance. How much is that power draw worth? Many have complained for a while about the astronomical power draw from GPUs, and finally we are seeing AMD actually deliver decent performance per Watt.

Let's just hope that all these horror stories we're hearing in the rumour mill about NVidia aren't true. I applaud AMD for delivering a range of GPUs when they don't really need too!

[kalniel]

Nice cards, and review!

I think you make an interesting point about the bandwidth - while they are behind the 4870 at 1920x, look at the 2560(?) resolution and they leap ahead - the extra framebuffer more than making up for the reduced bandwidth. I suspect that actually they are more ROP limited than bandwitdh, even with the 128bit bus, which just shows how fast that DDR5 is. AMD made a very clever decision to save die space with the narrower bus, and if nVidia bloat their die with a larger bus they'll get mega bandwitdh numbers.. but without any real world benefit.

I was also surprised just how often the 5770 beats or equals the 260 - it must be a fraction of the cost to produce, so the possible dissappearance of the 260 from the market suddenly makes more sense. AMD margins look really healthy (wish we could say the same for their CPU chips) and they've got the room to respond in price should they have to. As it is they're still good value for money, even at inflated launch prices!

[amdavies]

Was the 4870 a 512MB card, as reported during the benchmarks, or a 1GB card, as show in the bang4buck grid ? If it was a 512MB card, was it being benchmarked so as to provide a direct comparison to the GTS 250 rather than as a part of the ATI 1GB lineup ?
It does seem that the 4870 and 4890 are being under-priced by vendors attempting to shift stock and, right now, might be worth picking up over AMD's new 57x0 line.

[Tarinder]

It's a 512MB card. I should have made that clearer.

We tried to find the best ~£100 ATI card on the market, irrespective of architecture, and the HD 4870 512MB was it. That's why it was included.

[DeludedGuy]

What were the noise levels like?

[Arthran]

I'm looking to spend arround £100 for my next card, and now i cant decide whether the performance loss of the 5770 outweighs the heat and power draws of the 4870, if that makes sense.

would be nice to see a 5770 with a 256 memory buffer like the 5870, will be interesting to see the performance of that card!

[Percy1983]

I am getting confused now, I am building a resonable budget machine for a friend and Can't decide which to get.

Would I be right to think raw power wise it goes:
5870
5850
4890
4870
4850
5770
4770
5750

Looking like a 4870 might be the best bet but I do worry about DX11 a bit.

[Biscuit]

Tech powerup review!

[scaryjim]

would be nice to see a 5770 with a 256 memory buffer like the 5870, will be interesting to see the performance of that card!

Hmm, you want to see performance figures for a card with 800SP, 850MHz Clock speed and fast GDDR5 memory on a 256bit bus? Sounds like a 4890 to me When the 4850 / 4870 came out a few people did clock-for-clock comparisons of how much difference DDR5 made over DDR3 - remembering that DDR5 doubles the bandwidth at the same clock speed. It turned out to be between 5% and 20% depending on game, with a 10% - 15% gain being typical. A quick eyeball of this review shows a 4890 OC (so with a faster core clock) being about 20% ahead in most games, which sounds about right to me

Tarinder points out that nomenclature allows for a 5790 to bridge the gap, but the way ATI filled the gap between 4850 and 4670 was to release a 4830 first, so I wonder if we'll see a 5830 with another SIMD array or two turned off (16/20 banks would leave 1280 stream processors) to slot in between the 5770 and 5850. That would seem like a more natural approach to me. Plus, they can't add cores or memory controllers back to the cut down design so a 5790 would only ever be distinguished by bumped up clock speeds...

Let's also not forget that while the 4000-series are good value now, the 4870 and 4850 cost £175 and £125 at launch, so in fact it would be fairer to compare the 5770 to the 4850, and the 5750 to the 4830 (in fact, the 128bit DDR5 memory compares favourably with the 4850/30s 256bit DDR3...)

It also leaves me wondering if we'll see a 5730 crowbarred in with 640 stream processors; then a big chop down to 400 / 320 for the 5600 series (making them very similar, clock for clock, with the existing 4600s)...?

[Biscuit]

When stocks of the 4870 and 4890 (i assume they wont keep making them for too much longer) do start to dissapear do you reckon we might also see a 5830 or 5790 to take their place?

[Zak33]

You mention in the conclusion that we're paying for features rather than performance. How much is that power draw worth? Many have complained for a while about the astronomical power draw from GPUs, and finally we are seeing AMD actually deliver decent performance per Watt.

Let's just hope that all these horror stories we're hearing in the rumour mill about NVidia aren't true. I applaud AMD for delivering a range of GPUs when they don't really need too!

hear hear (or is it here here.... I dunno?)

The power use at tickover is SO LOW.. that it's amazing and while we're ALL ON HEXUS it'll save a small fortune in electricity bills.....

it almost begs a second one for crossfire-ness

[chis]

I'm looking to spend arround £100 for my next card, and now i cant decide whether the performance loss of the 5770 outweighs the heat and power draws of the 4870, if that makes sense.

would be nice to see a 5770 with a 256 memory buffer like the 5870, will be interesting to see the performance of that card!

Wondering this as well. Great to see these cards out there, I'm definitely in the market for something around this kind of performance (close to a 4850, it seems), but hopefully lower temps and power requirements.

Hopefully in a month or two we'll see some passive variants! I wouldn't mind if they're a little under-clocked, for this occasional gamer it'd still be enough!

[cordas]

*BAH* Colour me disappointed.... I was hoping for a 4870/260 killer... (even if they cost a touch more)

Will wait to see how these shake out in the market, just wish the 5770 was on a par with the 4870 then it would be a no brainer.

[scaryjim]

How much is that power draw worth?

In general terms, a 1W draw running 24/7 will cost / save you £1 per year (depending on tariff etc). The difference between a 5770 and a 4870 is 46W at idle, and a stonking 62W at full load. So, even assuming a more realistic usage pattern of around 8hours a day, you'd be saving between £15 and £20 per year...

[scaryjim]

*BAH* Colour me disappointed.... I was hoping for a 4870/260 killer... (even if they cost a touch more)

It's worth repeating that the 4870 cost £175 on launch day, compared to £125 for the 5770. That's more than "a touch" more.

Graphics card pricing seems to be in an odd situation at the minute, with some manufacturers presumably clearing back-catalogue, and some not: so ebuyer have 4890s at ~ £145 and 4850s at ~ £155! In fact, the whole of ATIs midrange is strangely bunched up and mixed around.

Once prices settle out I think this will make a lot more sense - it seems to me that while the 4870 is still selling well there's no point in ATI replacing it, and these boards are pretty much like for like replacements to the 4850 and 4830. I anticipate that a 5830 will be launched to take over from the 4870 / 4890 once back-stock has been run down enough...