Introduction

During this fall, AMD has been releasing their new Radeon HD 5000 Series cards. Currently, the smallest model is the Radeon HD 5750, which uses the same Juniper GPU as the HD 5770, but with lesser shaders, and reduced clock speeds.

Unlike with the big Radeon HD 5870 and HD 5850 models, for the Radeon HD 5700 series, add-in-board partners are allowed to make changes to the design right from the start to ensure optimal pricing, availability or other unique selling points they may have.

Sapphire's HD 5750 uses an AMD reference PCB, but with a typical Sapphire blue PCB. As cooler, Sapphire uses an in-house design that has been used on other HD 4xxx Series cards before.

Packaging

Sapphire's box looks well styled, even though I find the green as dominant color not too appropriate. You will easily find all important product specs on the package.

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
• ArcSoft SimHD

The Card

Compared to the stylish AMD coolers, the Sapphire cooler doesn't look too impressive. Let me tell you at this point already, it does an excellent job and runs very quiet on top of that.


Like all other HD 5000 cards, the design requires two slots in your system.


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.