ATI Radeon HD 5770 and 5750 CrossFire Video Cards

Final Thoughts & Conclusions

The Radeon HD 5700 series performed very well throughout our testing on the five games and two synthetic tests we ran on the cards. In fact the Radeon HD 5750 out performed the BFG Tech GeForce GTS 250 OC in six of the seven tests! The Radeon HD 5750 also used less power consumption at both idle/load and had a lower load temperature while in use. Not bad considering the Sapphire Radeon HD 5750 costs only $129 and comes with a product key for the PC game Colin McRae: DiRT 2! We ran out to Best Buy and bought our very own BFG Technologies GeForce GTS 250 OC video card for $161.49 on sale this week and as you can see from our testing it is not the better card even though it costs more. When it comes to the $109 to $129 price range AMD seems to have the market clearly won.

The Radeon HD 5770 was slightly slower than the Radeon HD 4890 in the benchmarks, but is still a solid card. Online you can find prices of the GeForce GTX 260 Core 216 slashed all the way down to $159.99 after rebate, so that would the direct competition to the Radeon HD 5770. We didn’t have time to benchmark the GeForce GTX 260 Core 216 for this review, but from what we have seen the card should be slightly faster than the Radeon HD 5770 in most benchmarks. Keep in mind that the GeForce GTX 260 lacks DirectX 11 support and future at mind the choice shouldn’t be too tough at this price range either.

AMD has launched four DirectX 11 ready graphics cards in less than a month and they offer a much better value than what NVIDIA offers at the same price point when it comes to gaming, power consumption and temperatures. The only thing that NVIDIA can tout over AMD right now is they fact that they can do PhysX and 3DVision. We have to admit in games like Batman AA running PhysX does add to the game and for those that have $599 burning a hole in their wallets 3D Vision is pretty darn slick.

The Sapphire Radeon HD 5750 was a very impressive card. The fact that it retails for $129 and comes with a custom GPU cooler and Colin McRae: DiRT 2 for that price and all the DirectX 11 features is amazing. Also being able to run three monitors from a $129 graphics card for ATI Eyefinity is nice to have for down the road. If you wanted to add that to your current PC with an old graphics card you’d have to purchase something like the Matrox TripleHead2Go Digital Edition for $288.08 and then you are still stuck with an old graphics card. AMD really has created some great graphics cards this time around and they all have amazing features.

Legit Bottom Line: AMD now owns the DirectX 11 market and offers four cards, ranging in price from $109 to $379!