ATI 5770 Crossfire Review

[Jason S. Global Moderator]

Like many people, I was waiting to upgrade my video card when the GTX480 was released. Upon reading reviews, i was a bit disappointed. It's performance was not what everyone had hoped, and it was going to cost $500 or more. I read a review of two 5770s in Crossfire and it piqued my interest. For a fraction of the cost of a GTX 480 or an ATI 5870, i could get nearly the same performance. I bought two cards on ebay for $135 a piece - brand new. So, in the end, a $270 investment netted me nearly the same performance as a 5870 for $420 or a GTX 480 for $500.

The cards are from XFX and Asus. the XFX is the vanilla model w/ the standard cooler and running at stock speeds. the Asus is the CuCore model which features a modified cooler for lower temps. When i checked GPU-Z under load, the sensors did indeed show 11-12C lower gpu temps over the XFX. Impressive.

I have not overclocked these cards yet, nor do i have much interest.

Below are screens taken from a spreadsheet i made. You can see the performance increases are all over the board. The performance in some benchmarks ranged from 140-200% while others were actually in the negative. If i did my math correctly, the average improvement over my old 8800GTS is 60% across all benchmarks.

So, for those interested, my computer specs are in my sig. These benchmarks only show the improvement gained by upgrading from a rather old video card to a modern, mainstream DX11 gpu.

Of all the benchmarks, im most impressed with the improvement in Vantage and Crysis on the "very high" setting. Incredible.

If there are any [free] benchmarks you all would like to see, please let me know. If you guys want to chime in with your own results, i'd love to compare scores between Fermi gpus and the 5870/5970.