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Review AMD’s Radeon HD 5770 and 5750 are the mid-range members of the new HD 5000 DirectX 11 graphics chip family. They’re fabbed using a 40nm process, just like their bigger brothers.

Sapphire’s HD 5770: reference Radeon HD 5770 design

But the number of transistors in these mid-range chips – codenamed ‘Juniper’ – has been reduced by just over a half, from the 2.15bn in the 58×0 design, codenamed ‘Cypress’, to 1.04bn. The area of the chip has also been quartered, from 334mm² to 166mm².

Armed with that information, you won’t be surprised to learn that the number of unified shaders in 5770 has been halved too. Which is to say that the 5870 has 1600 shaders and the 5770 has 800. The 5750 has 720.

When it comes to clock speeds, the 5770 has the same 850MHz core speed as 5870 while the 5750 runs at 700MHz, which is slightly slower than the 5850′s 725MHz frequency. The specification of the memory breaks with tradition as the junior 5750 and 5770 use 1GB of GDDR 5 just like the grown-up 5850 and 5870. In the past, we’ve been accustomed to mid-range chips that use slower memory than their high-end siblings do. The high-end chips use a 256-bit memory controller while the new mid-rangers settle for a 128-bit controller. Read the rest of this entry »

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Review Before we dive into our review of the HIS Digital HD 5870 and Sapphire HD 5870 graphics cards, let’s take a quick look at the technology behind the AMD’s new family of graphics chips.

Sapphire’s Radeon HD 5870: a 50 per cent gaming performance boost…

These DirectX 11 graphics cores use the same 40nm fabrication process that we saw in the ATI Radeon HD 4770 and this has allowed AMD to increase the transistor count by a huge margin. The 55nm HD 4870 packed 956m transistors into a die size of 263mm² while the new 40nm HD 5870 has 2.15bn transistors – 2.25 times more – in a die area of 334mm², 27 per cent bigger than the previous one.

Most of those extra transistors have been used to double the number of stream processors, or unified shaders, and the remainder support the DirectX 11 features that will be introduced with Windows 7. Read the rest of this entry »