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Radeon HD 5770 Roundup - ASUS vs. Gigabyte vs. HIS

By Kenny Yeo - 22 Jun 2010

Radeon HD 5770 Roundup - ASUS vs. Gigabyte vs. HIS

Revisiting the Radeon HD 5770

The Radeon HD 5770 SKU is perhaps one of the least exciting amongst ATI's lineup of Evergreen graphics cards. Perhaps overshadowed by its more impressive Radeon HD 5870 and HD 5850 siblings, the Radeon HD 5770 does not provide the leap in performance we were expecting.

Powered by the Juniper XT chip, its stream processor count and GPU sub-function unit numbers are identical to the older Radeon HD 4870. This means 800 stream processors, 40 texture mapping units and 16 raster operating units. However, it makes do with a narrower 128-bit memory bus - the Radeon HD 4870's is 256-bit wide. To compensate, the Radeon HD 5770 has higher clock speeds than the Radeon HD 4870; it's 100MHz faster at the core (850MHz) and a full 1200MHz DDR quicker at the memory subsystem (4800MHz DDR). Despite these revisions, stock-to-stock, a reference Radeon HD 5770 is only about as quick as its older Radeon HD 4870 predecessor, and loses out slightly to the Radeon HD 4890. So the performance expectations are a little disappointing when one generally expects improvements with newer gear.

Nevertheless, the new Juniper XT chip does bring about improvements such as support for DirectX 11, EyeFinity, and much lower operating temperatures and power draw. These are reasons enough for an upgrade for those who needed performance characteristics of the 4800 series but with the improved characteristics of the 5700 series.

Clockwise from top left: Gigabyte HD 5770 Super Overclock, HIS HD 5770 IceQ 5 Turbo and ASUS EAH5770 CuCore.

To further improve upon the Radeon HD 5770, vendors have been coming up with their own customized versions, which gives the Radeon HD 5770 SKU much needed pizzazz. Earlier, we have reviewed two customized Radeon HD 5770 cards from MSI and PowerColor, and today, we turn our attention to another three more contenders - ASUS, Gigabyte and HIS.

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