A Closer Look

After removing the "normal" cooler, you are left with a metal plate that covers the memory and the voltage regulation circuitry. I wonder why AMD did not go with a cooler design that has a heatsink base designed to cool all components. Even though the memory chips on the front of the card are cooled, the ones on the back are not.


AMD's HD 5770 cooler is a smaller, less powerful, more reasonably priced version of the HD 5850/5870 cooler. It is important to note here that there are no traditional heatpipes used in this cooler. Instead something similar to Sapphire's Vapor-X cooling technology is used. The whole copper baseplate acts as one big heatpipe which in theory should help with the heat transfer to the array of cooling fins on top of it.


Operation of the card requires one six-pin PCI-E power connector. My power consumption numbers show that the additional connector would not be required, but better safe than sorry. Also the connector is quite far into the cooler which makes it almost impossible to plug/unplug it when the card is installed in the case.


The GDDR5 memory chips are made by Hynix and carry the model number H5GQ1H24AFR-T2C. They are specified to run at 1250 MHz (5000 MHz GDDR5 effective).


The GPU voltage is managed by a ST L6788A voltage controller (same as on the HD 4770) which is I2C capable enabling software voltmods. Unfortunately at this time there is no software yet that supports this controller. ASUS notified me that their SmartDoctor will work with this kind of controller and voltage control is enabled on the ASUS EAH 5770.


This is AMD's new Juniper GPU, it comes with 1040 million transistors and is produced on a 40 nm process at TSMC Taiwan.