Radeon HD 5770 Roundup - ASUS vs. Gigabyte vs. HIS
By
Temperature, Power Consumption & Overclocking
Temperature
Where raw graphics performance was concerned, the cards were mostly evenly matched, but when it came to the effectiveness of their custom coolers, there was a clear winner. The Gigabyte HD 5770 Super Overclock recorded a maximum operating temperature of a cool 60 degrees Celsius, which represents a significant 8 degrees Celsius improvement over ATI's reference design.
On the other hand, it was disappointing to see the ASUS card with its special CuCore cooler and the HIS card with its IceQ 5 cooler, recording around 70 degrees Celsius, which meant the cooler didn't do much to improve on ATI's original design.
Power Consumption
Power consumption readings from our trio of cards matches up to that of a reference one, although it must be said that their readings at load were a tad higher. Our reference card recorded 177W at load, whereas the custom-design cards all recorded around 185W to 191W. And although the GeForce GTX 260 was competitive, its power draw was easily the highest.
Overclocking
While the Gigabyte HD 5770 Super Overclock failed to convincingly outperform its lower clocked rival, the HIS HD 5770 IceQ 5 Turbo on stock performance, it did well on our overclocking tests, as we successfully got it to run stably at 970MHz at the core and at a nearly unbelievably 5500MHz DDR at the memory. This gave us 5356 3DMarks on the Extreme preset. To be fair, the HIS and ASUS cards weren't too far behind.
