HIS Radeon HD 5770

Near–HD 4870 performance at a budget price

AMD has wasted no time bringing its DirectX 11 GPU architecture to a more affordable, mainstream-class GPU in the HD 5770. HIS is one of the first manufacturers to bring the HD 5770 to market.

At around $160, the card is priced similarly to existing Radeon HD 4870 cards. It’s the lowest-cost card in the roundup, and given the 180mm2 die size (that’s incredibly tiny for a GPU), prices are likely to eventually come down even further.

While the HIS HD 5770’s benchmark scores were the lowest in the roundup, this needs to be put into context. The card is practically miserly with power. Our system’s idle power of 142W was on a par with other HD 5000 series cards, but power at full bore was a scant 251W—about 10W lower than the HD 5850. The card requires just a single PCI Express power connector.

For the low price, you have to give up some graphical amenities, like antialiasing. It’s worth noting, however, that the HD 5770 still delivers 38fps in the Far Cry 2 action scene and 51fps in Ubisoft’s HAWX flight sim with AA and AF enabled. And like all the HD 5000 series, you can connect up to three displays to a single card.

So if you’re on a tight budget, and are still looking for a solid gaming experience and efficient power usage, check out the HIS HD 5770.

Review Roundup:

XFX Radeon HD 5870                             HID Radeon HD 5870

Sapphire Radeon HD 5870                           Asus EAHH5850

Diamond Radeon HD 5850                      Sapphire Radeon HD 5850

Gigabyte 260 GTX Super OC                         HIS Radeon HD 5770

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HIS Radeon HD 5770

Nutritious

Affordable; DirectX 11 support; only one power connector needed.

Delicious

Only a one year warranty; toolkit bundle from Newegg only

http://www.hisdigital.com/us/

Benchmarks

	HIS 5770	EVGA 285 GTX SSC
3DMark Vantage Performance	10,194	13,941
3DMark Vantage Extreme	4,290	6,276
HAWX (fps)	41	62
Far Cry / Action (fps)	38	47
Far Cry 2 / Ranch Long (fps)	43	56
Battle Forge / DX10 (fps)	24	46
Crysis / DX10 (fps)	17	22
Resident Evil 5 (fps)	64	87
X3: Terran Conflict (fps)	74	93
STALKER: Clear Skies (fps)	19	27

Best scores are bolded. All games were run at 1920x1200 with all detail levels maxed out and 4x AA enabled. Anisotropic filtering was also enabled in game, where available.