PowerColor HD5770 Review

gotdamojo06 - October 12, 2009
» Discuss this article (5)

Lowest Prices

Testing:

Testing the Powercolor HD5770 will consist of running the card through the OverclockersClub suite of games and synthetic benchmarks to test the performance of the HD5870 against many popular competitors to gauge its performance. The games used are some of today's popular titles to give you an idea on how the cards perform relative to each other. The system specifications will remain the same throughout the testing. No adjustment will be made to the respective control panels during the testing with the exception of the 3DMark Vantage testing where PhysX will be disabled in the nVidia control panel. Clock speeds on each card are left at stock speeds. I will test the Sapphire HD5870 at both stock speeds and then overclocked to see how much additional performance is available when you choose to overclock the card to see if it this card can unseat the current single GPU fastest card on the market. I have also changed up the benchmark suite to include some of the newest titles to market, including Batman: Arkham Asylum, Resident Evil 5 and Darkest of Days.

Processor: Intel Core I7 920 150x20
Motherboard: MSI X58 Eclipse SLI
Memory: Mushkin HP3 12800 7-7-7-20
Video Card(s): Powercolor HD5770
Power Supply: Mushkin 800 watt Modular power supply
Hard Drive: 1 x Seagate 1TB SATA
Optical Drive: Lite-on DVD-RW
OS: Windows Vista Ultimate Edition SP2 64bit
Case: NZXT Beta Evo

Comparison Video Cards:

Overclocking:

Overclocked settings:

Sapphire HD5870 950/1400

When it came down to overclocking the PowerColor HD5770, I was able to achieve a whopping 960MHz on the core and 1450MHz on the memory, though these settings were not stable for benchmarking. Once I started to play around with the overclock a little, I was able to get a stable clock of 950MHz on the core and 1400MHz on the memory. That's an 11.75% increase on the core and an increase of 16.66% on the memory, which is nothing to take lightly! I was very surprised that these settings were able to make it through the rigorous testing that I put the card through. The overclocking tool that I usually use for my video card, AMD GPU Tool, was unable to work with the new card; however, MSI Afterburner, a new videocard overclocking tool, was able to work with the HD5770 and got me the clock speeds that I was able to work with.