Introduction

Today AMD further strenghtened their Radeon HD 5000 Series lineup with the release of the HD 5770 and HD 5750. Both cards are targeted at the sub $150 price segment. They both use AMD's new Juniper graphics processor which features 800 shader units, like RV770. Feature-wise those new cards offer the same features that were added with the HD 5800 Series, for example DirectX 11, Eyefinity, support for more than two active displays at the same time and improvements to HDMI Audio.


HD 5770's Juniper is essentially a halved version of Cypress. It comes with only one shader partition which contains 800 shaders. Instead of up to six displays, a maximum of five display outputs is available on the Radeon HD 5770 and HD 5750. The number of ROPs has also been halved to 16. Directly affected by the number of ROPs is the memory bus width, which becomes 128 bit from 256 bit. Please note that this won't be much of a problem since 128 bit GDDR5 is equivalent to 256 bit GDDR3.

The HIS Radeon HD 5770 follows the AMD reference design specifications to the letter, and simply adds the included accessories and the sticker on the cooler.

Packaging

HIS is shipping their card in quite an unconventional package. The form factor isn't your average VGA card box as far as size goes. On the front, back and the sides you find additional product information like specs highlights and system requirements.

Contents

You will receive:

• Graphics card
• DVI to analog adapter
• Dirt 2 coupon (for Steam version)
• Driver CD + Manual
• PCI-E power cable
• CrossFire bridge

The Card

AMD's Radeon HD 5770 follows the same design principle set forth by the HD 5800 Series. The cooler design is one of the best looking I have seen so far. Unlike the HD 5870, there is no back plate on the graphics card which helps to keep cost reasonable. But this also means that the memory chips on the back of the card are not cooled at all, which isn't a problem for memory overclocking as we will see later in the review.


From left to right: Radeon HD 5770, HD 5850 and HD 5870.


It seems AMD is switching to a dual slot cooler design for their new cards. Like the HD 5870 and HD 5850, the HD 5770 uses a dual slot cooler too.


The card has two DVI ports, one HDMI port and one DisplayPort. This is just one of many output configurations that are possible on the new cards, thanks to the overhauled display output logic. Basically the card can drive six TMDS signals that can be combined in any way (a dual-link DVI consumes two TMDS lines).
For HDMI Audio, NVIDIA requires you to feed an external audio source, for example from your motherboard's on-board audio, to the card via SPDIF cable. AMD on the other hand has integrated a sound device inside their GPUs which is the easier solution for most users. Also AMD's integrated sound device has been upgraded to support HDMI 1.3a which includes Dolby TrueHD, DTS-HD, AC-3, DTS and up to 7.1 channel audio with 192 kHz / 24-bit.


Crossfire configurations are supported to improve performance even further.


Here are the front and the back of the card, high-res versions are also available (front, back). If you choose to use these images for voltmods etc, please include a link back to this site or let us post your article.