Sapphire HD5770 Crossfire Review
3D Mark, Dirt 2 & NFS Shift
Published: 29th March 2010 | Source: Sapphire | Price: £249.96 |
Benchmarking
The proof of the pudding, so the old adage goes, is in the eating. It would be almost as wise to state that the proof of performance is in the benchmarks.
3D Mark Vantage
The acid test. Whilst normally I berate 3D Mark Vantage for being totally incapable of providing a baseline for the performance we can expect to see, if nothing else it absolutely loves power. The more the merrier. It can eat everything you can throw at it and come back asking "Please Sir, can I have some more?".
Straight away you can see that our HD5770 Crossfire setup slaughters the HD5850, easily keeps up with a HD5870 and, in overclocked trim, beats it. It seems like ATI haven't nerfed the HD5770 after all.
Dirt 2
Codemasters Dirt 2 is a very pretty DX11 race game that is very well optimised providing playable framerates on even average systems. The slight downside is that we don't get those obscene numbers we do with other games, but past 60FPS it's fairly academic anyway.
We see the Vantage results well replicated here with the 5850 comfortably last, the 5770xf keeping up with the 5870 and the OC 5770xf managing to win out again.
Need For Speed Shift
EA rejuvinated the flagging Need For Speed series with Shift, that nicely combined the NFS upgrade mechanics with a much more realistic racing experience. We were so sick of drifting around nighttime streets that it was a breath of fresh air and we still adore it as much as we ever did.
Testing gave us the result we're almost expecting now and the only real thing of note is how low the 5870 Maximum is. Of course when you're benchmarking in "live" play rather than a fixed set there will always be variances.
So much for driving round a track. Can we shoot people in the head now?
Most Recent Comments
If funds weren't too much of an issue would it still be recommended to go with a 5870 instead?
If you plan on purchasing a setup and sticking with it until some future release, go 5770.
And another question (more relating to my setup) - are two 8x PCI-E lanes sufficient? Would a better chipset than P45 be worth investing in to make the most from these cards?
do you have stats on that? how does the dual 5770 compare?
So much for driving round a track. Can we shoot people in the head now?
I lol'd
It's so pleasing to see these reviews, after buying these cards 4 months ago, only because we can't find a 5850 at a reasonable price...
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Originally Posted by name='alexhull24'
A pair of these makes a great combination it seems. What I wonder is, how powerful a CPU do you need so that you're not bottlenecking this setup on most games?
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Originally Posted by name='tinytomlogan'
No mate thats completely inaccurate unless the CPU was a single core celeron.
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Here is a shot with everything maxed on one card in the menu.
http://i72.photobucket.com/albums/i1...n/benchmin.jpg
And the same menu about twenty minutes later with the second card fitted.
http://i72.photobucket.com/albums/i1...iburon/new.jpg
I had a gap between getting one card and the other because the second was an RMA exchange for my dead 280GTX
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Originally Posted by name='tinytomlogan'
Start a thread fella, always good to see individual results
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Originally Posted by name='alexhull24'
And another question (more relating to my setup) - are two 8x PCI-E lanes sufficient? Would a better chipset than P45 be worth investing in to make the most from these cards? |
I too have a board that shares the bandwidth into 2 x 8xPCIE. I read for about a week before deciding that it would be fine. In my 3dvantage I scored 14,400 or so on 3dmarks. The test system used for the review here probably cost 2-3 times what mine did. My motherboard was £30 and my CPU will not touch an I7 (Phenom 2 940).
So yes, the particular set up used here scored 3000 more 3dmarks than mine did and it probably allowed the 5770s to stretch their legs more but 14,400 is still a very respectable score for a system like mine.
I did read somewhere that putting the same system into a motherboard with twin 16X PCIE slots gained about 1000 points more than the system with 2 x 8X PCIE slots.
Also consider that your 280 will score about what mine did in Vantage - about 9000 3dmarks. So to sum it up if you already have a system with 2 x 8x PCIE slots then it would be financial suicide for the levels of performance you will gain (hardly any tbh).
GPU @ 875 (XXX speed, now you can see why paying £35 for this paltry OC is brainless) and ram at 1350 (XFX XXX @ 1300).
http://i72.photobucket.com/albums/i1...ntageblack.png
http://i72.photobucket.com/albums/i1...eblackfull.png
I'm not going to push them any harder as I don't need them going wrong. It's also doing a Nelly (getting hot in here) and I don't fancy taking off all my clothes.
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