Sapphire HD5770 Crossfire Review
Conclusion
Published: 29th March 2010 | Source: Sapphire | Price: £249.96 |
Conclusion
Wow. That almost left us breathless.
Back at the start we wondered if the speed to which the community latched on to the performance that a HD4770 Crossfire setup had, would ATI deliberately detune the HD5770 so that the HD5870 still was the weapon of choice for extreme framerates.
Clearly, and comprehensively, they didn't.
Sapphire have produced a card that gave us enough headroom for a 110MHz core and 200MHz GDDR5 overclock. Probably the most surprising aspect is that the little HD5770 easily kept up with its bigger brothers even in standard trim. Once they were run in an overclocked state it sprang into the lead and, barring one test, never relinquished it.
Given the relative performance levels of the £350 HD5870 and £250 HD5850 in our HD5000 series roundup, we expected that two HD5770s, costing around £250 for the pair, would give us around HD5850 performance or maybe a little more. How foolish preconceptions can appear in hindsight.
So at the start we set out to see if a good value choice was still a HD5850 or if a pair of HD5770s in Crossfire could soothe your gaming ache without upsetting your significant other. And the answer has to be neither. HD5770s in Crossfire aren't merely a good value choice, they are a great performance choice regardless of budget.
Sure if you've won the lottery, are the Chairmen of a bank or maybe even Bernie Ecclestone then for bleeding edge performance you still have to splash the cash on a couple of HD5870s.
For us mere mortals we can get 5870 performance, for 5850 money. And that definitely is good value, in the best meaning of the term and for this reason we have no qualms about giving it our Editors Choice award.
Many thanks to Sapphire for providing the HD5770s for todays review. Discuss in our forums.
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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