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Appeared on: Monday, January 4, 2010
Club3D HD5770

1. Features, specifications

The ATI 5xxx series have won many awards mainly for their high performance and their support for DirectX 11. Club3D has released its own solution based on AMD's HD5770 design promising to offer great value at an affordable price.

The ATI 5xxx series include many new features for end users such as the ATI Eyefinity Technology for multi-display configurations and full support for DirectX 11. The high-end models (HD5850/5870) cost more and the HD5700 series offer the same features, a more attractive retail price and hopefully a great gaming experience.

- Features & Benefits

As you can see the GPU has been designed with the 40nm process resulting to a low power consumption. Its core is clocked at 850MHz core, while the onboard GDDR5 memory runs at 1200MHz .

- Retail package

The Club3D HD5770 ( CGAX-57724C) comes in a small black retail box with a generally minimal design. However, the basic information is available at a glance: 1024MB of GDDR5 memory, HDMI output, 40nm design GPU and support for DirectX 11.

At the time this article was written, the card is listed online for about €144 (including VAT), which is a rather aggressive and competitive price compared to Nvidia's offerings.

The card is packaged into an anti-static bag. Here we find installation instructions, a CD-ROM with drivers/software and two connectors - a DVI-D-to-DSub and a CrossFire bridge. No retail game is bundled.

The Club3D HD5770 graphics card has small dimensions (22cm length) and comes equipped with a Club3D cooler:

The card requires at least a 450 Watt or greater power supply unit and a single 75W 6-pin PCI Express power connector should be used.

The card's height will enough to occupy two slots at the back of your PC. The available outputs include two DVI-D, an HDMI and a DisplayPort ports.

Of course with older monitors with a D-Sub port the bulked connector is essential to get hooked. The product also supports the Eyefinity Technology allowing up to three monitors to be installed .More information can be found over here.

After installing the graphics card we see more details about its main features and specifications. The GPU core runs at 850MHz and the memory at 1200MHz. These are exactly as the ATI's reference board:

2. Test PC setup
All the test were conducted using the following PC setup:

Many games and applications were used for the evaluation of the performance of each graphics card. In addition we used the FRAPS software to measure the in-game performance when needed.

DirectX 9

DirectX10

3. Testbed DirecrtX9, DirectX10
- Testbed DirectX9

For all the tests we used the default settings of the 3DMark05 software as you can see below:

Again we left all the settings to default:

- Testbed DirectX10

We used the three built- in benchmarks to test the performance of each graphics card. We measured the performances at various resolutions using the "Performance" and up to the "Extreme" settings.

We used the built-in benchmark with all the graphics detail settings maxed out.

We used the hocbench Crysis benchmark tool at the resolutions of 1280x1024, 1680x1050 and finally 1920x1200. We run the benchmark software with "High" and "Very High" details enabled in order to identify the optimum settings for a decent game play.

We used the FRAMEBuffer benchmark tool at 1280x1024, 1680x1050 and finally at 1920x1200. All the possible quality levels were set in order to get an idea of what each graphics card can offer.

We used the built-in benchmarking utility and maxed out all visual details, under both DX9/DX10 and settings up to 16x AA/16x AF.

4. Benchmarks - FutureMark Hall Of Fame

The Futuremark benchmarks have been highly discussed among gamers and reviewers. For your information we post the results from 3DMark 05, 3DMark 06 and of course the latest 3DMark Vantage benchmarking software, which give you a rough idea of the performance of each graphics card.

The Club3D HD5770 gave a great 3DMark05 performance with 17131 score points:

Passing to the 3DMark 06 score, we can see that the Club3D HD5770 is faster than the HD4870 by a small margin and much faster than the "previous" HD4770 series:

The 3DMark Vantage provides a clearer view about the card's performance at various resolutions, starting from 1280x1024 and up to 1920x1200. Compared with other graphics cards, the Club3D HD5770 is almost as fast as the XFX 260GTX XXX and much faster than the XFX HD4770 series. Let's hope that these figures will be also be confirmed in real life gaming.

5. Benchmarks - Crysis (DirectX10)

Let's move on with the very demanding "Crysis" game. The most other tested graphics cards offered acceptable frame rates at 1280x1024 (High quality settings). The Club3D HD5770 delivered 48FPS (average) with "High details" enabled (28FPS min & 64FPS max), which is the third best performance we have ever measured in our labs. The card was also 7.0 FPS faster than the HD4770:

Enabling the "Very High Quality" settings has a big impact on the performance. This time the Club3D HD5770 gave 19FPS (14min & 30max), which again is higher than what we got from both the HD4770 and HD4870 graphics cards. The XFX 260GTX XXX seems to be somewhat faster and gave 21.0 FPS. Rising up resolution will not make sense for this game since you need to have an SLI/Crossfire system to get an adequate performance:

6. Benchmarks - Crysis Warhead (DirectX9, DirectX10), S.T.A.L.K.E.R: Call Of Pripyat Benchmark
- Crysis Warhead (DirectX9, DirectX10)

This is another version of the popular Crysis game, the "Crysis Warhead". Compared to the original game, Crysis Warhead features many visual improvements in both DirectX9 and DirectX10 rendering modes. Below are the test results we wrote down for various resolutions with the anti-aliasing feature disabled.

The Club3D delivered a very good performance and the game was playable even at the "Gamer" level. The "Enthusiast" level would require a more powerful card:

Below you can see that the Gainward HD4870 and the Club3D HD5770 have a similar performance with DX9 shaders:

Passing to the DX10 shaders, the Club3D HD5770 shows its strength and delivers a performance equal to the XFX 260GTX XXX series.

- S.T.A.L.K.E.R: Call Of Pripyat Benchmark

The "Call of Pripyat" benchmark is freely available for everyone in order to have an idea of the visuals of the upcoming game and also test your system with the game and share your score online with other users. We used the highest detail settings under DX10 and a resolution of 1920x1200.

The results are very good for the 'Day/Night/Rain' scenarios but worse at the 'SunShaft' preset.

The DX10 shaders benchmark showed good performance with 24 FPS (average) and 38.3 FPS max.

Passing to the DX11 shaders, the performance seems to be increased (!). At the 'Sunshafts' the Card gave 29FPS average and 39.4 FPS max.

7. Benchmarks - Company Of Heroes v1.71 (DirectX 10)

Company Of Heroes is a popular action/strategy game with many fans around the world. The game it was the first ever to utilize the DirectX10 and the game physics are very impressive. We maxed out all the visual details and the built-in benchmark provided the in-game FPS for each card.

The Club3D HD5770 delivers good FPS reaching the 59FPS at 1280x1024 and 52.60FPS at the resolution of 1920x1200. Notice that all the ATI graphics cards showed a similar performance with Company Of Heroes...

8. Benchmarks - Far Cry 2 (DirectX 9/10), Left4Dead (DirectX 9), StreetFighter IV (DirectX 9)

- Far Cry 2 (DirectX 9/10)

Far Cry 2 is one of the hottest game titles right now. The game supports both DirectX 9 and DirectX10 and its graphics engine is much lighter than the one used by the "Crysis" game title. As a result, most of the graphics cards graphic cards perform very well even at 1920x1200 with 16xAA/16xAF enabled.

The Club3D HD5770 gave the highest performance in all the resolution we tested with the visuals set to "Ultra Quality" . The card is clearly faster than the older HD4870 series:

Enabling DX10 shaders and the 'Ultra high' quality settings did not change the ranking among the cards in our test. The Club3D HD5770 gave the the highest performance with 60.56FPS. However, enabling the 16xAA/AF had a significant impact to the FPS since they they dropped to 29.31

- Left4Dead (DirectX 9)

With the Left4Dead gaming title we used a custom timedemo and measured the performance of the graphics card using the the embedded console, for resolutions up to 1920x1200 with 16xAF enabled. and maximized all visual settings.

The Club3D HD5770 was very strong in resolutions up to 1920x1200 with 16xAF enabled. However enabling the AA resulted to a big performance hit. We assume that it has to do with the graphics drivers.

 

- StreetFighter IV (DirectX 9)

Lastly, two more benchmarks from the Streetfighter IV an Unigine benchmark (DX10) demonstrating the graphics performance of the Club3D HD5770. Again, the card's performance dropped after enabling the AA :

9. Overclocking, conclusion

- Overclocking

In order to ovreclock the card you should first enable the ATI Overdrive function found under the Catalyst Control Center. The 'Auto tune' function will test the graphics card's limits and will give you a stable operation. Most of the times the results are lower than what you can get with manual testing:

After several testing attempts and after running the the Crysis stress test, we managed to get a 940MHz for core and 1345MHz for the memory, which was totally stable for us. Note that the fan speed was set to automatic. Enabling a higher fan rotation may lead to higher performance but also to more noise:

- Conclusion

The Club3D HD5770 is actually an improved version of the ATI HD5770, at least for the cooling part. The new HD5770 series offer a very good performance in all cases and even with the newest demanding games such as the Dirt 2, it will give you high rates at 1920x1200 with 'High quality' settings enabled:

Dirt 2
Detail Level
1920x1200
(Average)
Medium
64.40
High
42.80
Ultra
38.20

The HD5770 series also support the ATI Eyefinity technology, which offers the ability to connect one to up-to six monitors (depending on AIC/AIB choices in outputs) to your videocard and use it in a desktop environment, or to create an incredibly wide monitor resolution to play games in. It's nice, it is niche and certainly not an option many of you will use. Although we did not test it this review, it would be useful for first person shooter gamers for sure.

The card also allows hardware acceleration for video playback and has a retail price of ~ €144, providing a great value value/money ratio. Actually we could say that it is the strongest graphics card you can get at this price tag, considering that is supports DirectX 11.

Graphic card series
Retail price range
Nvidia GTS 250
115~136 Euro
Nvidia GTX 260
189 Euro
Nvidia GTX 275
230~255 Euro
ATI HD4890
159 Euro
ATI HD4770
144~169 Euro

Overclocking is also allowed with good margins although getting very high clocks would need you to force the fan work in higher rpm, which produces more noise.

If we had to list a negative that would be the big performance drop as soon as we enabled the anti-aliasing, something that could be hopefully a driver.

So the Club3D HD5770 seems to be an excellent performer for DirectX 9, 10 & 11 game titles. The 40nm design of the GPU allowed AMD and its partners to offer a winner product. AMD is moved to attack the sub-$200 market, while it managed to keep the momentum going with the Radeon HD 5770 and 5750. Until we see something faster from Nvidia, we have no problem suggesting this graphics card for everyone who cannot spend a fortune to power the graphics of their gaming system. This series is the first ever mid-range DX11 class product series that is affordable, comes with a great feature set, and is highly competitive performance wise.



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