AMD ATI Radeon HD 5770 Review

AMD ATI Radeon HD 5750

Manufacturer: AMD
UK Pricing: £99.99 (inc VAT)
US Pricing: $129.99 (ex Tax)

In order to keep the 5770 and 5750 apart, the 5750 has had its SIMD core count reduced from 10 to nine, meaning there are 720 stream processors and 36 texture units enabled. What's more, AMD chose to reduce its clock frequencies - the engine runs at 700MHz and the memory ticks along at 1,150MHz (4,600MHz effective).

As a result, the theoretical peak compute throughput has dropped from 1.36 teraFLOPS to 1.008 teraFLOPS, while memory bandwidth has been reduced from 76.8GB per second to 73.6GB per second. Apart from that, very little has changed inside Juniper between the two models in the 5700 series.


Where things really start to get different is when you look at the two boards, as the 5750's PCB and power circuitry has understandably been cut back somewhat. The board is just 18cm long (7.25in) but, given its 86W maximum board power, it still includes a single 6-pin PCI-Express power connector.

The power circuit features three phases for the GPU, a couple of phases for the memory and a couple of extra chokes for the memory controller. The GPU's power phases feature two standard MOSFETs per choke, while the memory phases include just one MOSFET per choke. Finally, the memory controller's power circuitry is probably the most interesting, as it uses two different choke types with one MOSFET each.


The cooler has also been swapped for something much simpler too - we'll be looking at that in more detail when we review the 5750 in the near future. It's a simple aluminium blower that doesn't direct air outside of the case and, as far as we can tell, has no temperature speed control. However, we haven't fully tested it yet because the card didn't arrive in time to complete a full set of benchmarks, so we'll reserve our final judgements until a later date.

An interesting point to note here though is that, like its higher-priced siblings, it's also a dual-slot card because AMD has chosen to include a full complement of display outputs, including HDMI, DisplayPort and a pair of dual-link DVI connectors stacked atop of one another. There's very little else to say about the card without fully testing it, so stay tuned.