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.