Introduction

Last year AMD released their new Radeon HD 5800 Series of graphics cards which quickly became a big success due to the numerous improvements made over previous generations. Over the course of the last months AMD has been adding more cards to their DirectX 11 lineup quickly, most recently the Radeon HD 5670.
AMD's Radeon HD 5770 has been out for several months as we are seeing the first customized designs now. Sapphire has chosen to stick with the proven AMD PCB design and added their custom Vapor-X cooling solution. Unfortunately the clock speeds have remained the same as on the reference design: 850 / 1200. Considering that all other overclocked version from other AIBs (that I have seen to far) go to like 875 / 1250, there is not much difference anyway.
Sapphire HD 5770 Vapor-X can be found online for around $175, which is $20 more than the reference design from AMD.

Packaging

With all the ice and blue color Sapphire's package sends the statement "cool". The front is filled up pretty well by stickers or similar elements, but I like that - easy to see the major product features at a quick glance.

Contents

You will receive:

• Graphics card
• Driver CD + Quick Install Guide + ArcSoft SimHD
• DiRT 2 coupon
• CrossFire bridge
• DVI to VGA adapter
• PCI-E power cable

The Card

As mentioned before, Sapphire is using AMD's black reference PCB together with their Vapor-X cooler which makes a nice couple it seems.


Just like the reference design, the card occupies two slots in the 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.