Sapphire ATI Radeon HD 5750 1GB Review

Major hardware releases can be a little befuddling for a tech journalist, as there's a whole load of new numbers to learn. While this is very much par for the course, ATI's new Radeon HD 5000-series of cards are a particular headache for me. There are just too many fives, sevens and eights. The last of ATI's launches we're looking at is the low end Radeon HD 5750, a cut-down version of the HD 5770, which itself is a cut-down version of the Radeon HD 5870 and HD 5850. See what I mean?

Like the HD 5770, the HD 5750 is based on ATI's Juniper GPU, comprising effectively half of the Cypress GPU of the HD 5800 cards. The HD 5750 flavour of Juniper has nine cores, meaning there are 720 stream processors and is clocked at 700MHz, with the faster HD 5770 equipped with ten cores (800 stream processors) and clocked twenty percent higher at 850MHz.

HD 5750 cards are available in either 512MB or 1GB flavours, but this Sapphire card has 1GB of GDDR5 clocked with a stock rated frequency of 1.15GHz (4.6GHz). Like the HD 5770, the HD 5750 has a 128-bit memory interface, meaning that this card has 73.6GB/sec of memory bandwidth.

Fabricated on TSMC's new 40nm technology, the chip uses less power and generates less heat than previous GPUs. ATI has eschewed the Batmobile cooler of the rest of the HD 5000-series for the HD 5750 in favour of a simple aluminium heatsink and fan. However, Sapphire has ditched the stock ATI cooler in favour of its own aluminium heatsink-plus-fan cooler. It looks a bit better than ATI's, as the fan and heatsink are both larger, and the fan blows directly down on to the heatsink, rather than being embedded in it. The cooler looks neat, but throws hot air in all directions and not out of the rear of your case as the coolers of the other HD 5000-series cards do. bit-tech

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