Date:
Monday , November 23, 2009
Author:
Matthew Krysiak
Editor:
Brent Justice
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PowerColor HD5770 Video Card Review

Think your old GeForce GTX 260 or Radeon HD 4870 is getting a little long in the tooth? They’ve both had a great run, but now it might be time to upgrade. We see how these two video cards compare to the brand new PowerColor HD5770.

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System Test Setup

For our test system platform we are using an ASUS Blitz Formula motherboard with an Intel Core 2 Extreme QX9650 processor at 3.66GHz, and 4GB of OCZ Technology DDR2 PC2-8000 Platinum. For the power supply, we will be using a Corsair TX750W.

While it might be a bit "overkill," we use the 3.6GHz overclocked quad-core processor in an attempt to keep from putting our evaluation into a position of being CPU limited. Obviously, we make every effort to not use CPU limited games for video card evaluations, but the 3.6GHz processor seems to put many peoples’ minds at ease when it comes to that subject.

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For this evaluation Windows 7 x64 RTM will be used. We are using the latest drivers for the ATI Radeon HD 4870, Catalyst 9.10 WHQL. With the PowerColor HD5770, we are using the Catalyst 8.66.6 Beta 2 dated October 7th. We have the ForceWare 195.39 Beta driver installed for the NVIDIA GeForce GTX 260.

Below is the GPU-Z screenshot of the PowerColor HD5770 after we installed the drivers

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Evaluation Method

We evaluate what each video card configuration can supply us in terms of a playable gaming experience while supplying the best culmination of resolution and "eye candy" graphical settings. We focus on quality and immersion of the gameplay experience rather than how many frames per second the card can get in a canned benchmark or prerecorded timedemo situation that often do not represent real gameplay like you would experience at home . Then we will follow with apples-to-apples testing based on real gameplay as well.