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As of late November, Newegg is selling a few Radeon HD5770 cards at $164.99; three of them will set you back less than $500. Consider the fact that this combination smokes all of the following cards: GTX285, HD5870, GTX295, and beats the HD5970 in a couple scenarios with the Far Cry 2 and Resident Evil 5 benchmarks. If that's not a bargain, I don't know what is. There is an additional cost in system complexity, and partial incompatibility, however. You don't want to go this route if your favorite game is World in Conflict, at least until performance is addressed in a driver update. Radeon HD5770 CrossFireXTM earns a Gold Tachometer Award, because it delivers an unprecedented level of performance at the $500 mark. Not only that, it's budget friendly in another way; you don't have to come up with all the cash up front. You can buy one card now, and have a guaranteed upgrade path. What makes this combination more worthy than CrossFireX combinations in the past is its scalability with first generation drivers. This is the first time an entirely new architecture has come out of the gate with this level of stability and performance in a multi-GPU arrangement. |
One performance disadvantage to CrossFireXTM is the fact that only the memory of one card is in use. The other RAM just sits there, idle. So, in all of our tests, we were working with 1GB of GDDR5. At our maximum testing resolution of 1920x1200, that wasn't a problem. At 2560x1600, or with multiple monitors, it could have become a handicap. On the whole, we went looking for some excellent performance scaling and we found it. We also found very reasonable power requirements and operating temperatures, both well established traits of the entire HD5xxx series. |
The three Radeon HD5770 cards pulled 77 (196-119) watts at idle and 388 (507-119) watts when running full out, using the test method outlined above. That works out to 26 watts and 129 watts per card, which is a little bit above the factory numbers of 18W at idle and 108W per card under load. I attribute most of that to me manually setting the fans to a constant 100%, and to the load that FurMark put on the CPU. As I mentioned before, these are very reasonable power numbers for a 3-GPU setup, and well within the range that most PSU can provide. No need for a 1,000 watt power supply to run these at full power, I made do with my trusty single-rail 750W Corsair. I even had one PCI-E cable to spare. |
Originally Posted by Du-z Hang on this is the same as any Multi-GPU setup |
Originally Posted by Enigma8750 Are the 5770's DX11 ready or not? |
| Cons: - Only 1GB of memory available, 3GB paid for |
Originally Posted by Enigma8750 Are the 5770's DX11 ready or not? |
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Originally Posted by Enigma8750 Thanks. Your right.. They just disappeared off the web. I think I just killed them 
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Originally Posted by Blindrage606 The utilization of only 1GB of vram is too much of a con for me to seriously consider this card array. Higher resolutions+higher texture packs in future games will eventually demand more than more than 1GB storage on gfxcards. Although, quite impressive for what you pay for. |
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Originally Posted by Blindrage606 The utilization of only 1GB of vram is too much of a con for me to seriously consider this card array. Higher resolutions+higher texture packs in future games will eventually demand more than more than 1GB storage on gfxcards. Although, quite impressive for what you pay for. |
Originally Posted by Enigma8750 Are the 5770's DX11 ready or not? |
Originally Posted by RonindeBeatrice I've pretty much conceded that although they may never wise up and make a single slot version of this card, I'm probably going to buy one anyway as it's a little shorter and more energy efficient (and a decent bit faster) than my HD4850. |
Originally Posted by sLowEnd You never know what the AIB's might make when availability gets better. There is a single slot GTX260 after all. |
