XFX Radeon HD 5770 1GB GDDR5 Review

Heat & Acoustics

For all temperature testing, the cards were placed on an open test bench with a single 120mm 1200RPM fan placed ~8” away from the heatsink. The ambient temperature was kept at a constant 22°C (+/- 0.5°C). If the ambient temperatures rose above 23°C at any time throughout the test, all benchmarking was stopped. For this test we use the 3DMark Batch Size test at it highest triangle count with 4xAA and 16xAF enabled and looped it for one hour to determine the peak load temperature as measured by GPU-Z.

For Idle tests, we let the system idle at the Vista desktop for 15 minutes and recorded the peak temperature.


Low temperatures are what we have come to expect from ATI’s 40nm cards and the HD 5770 is no different. Even though its peak temperature is close to that of the HD 4890, it should be stated that the 4000-series card is also noisy as hell when under load. Meanwhile, the HD 5770 is quiet as a mouse throughout its load range.

Power Consumption

For this test we hooked up our power supply to a UPM power meter that will log the power consumption of the whole system twice every second. In order to stress the GPU as much as possible we once again use the Batch Render test in 3DMark06 and let it run for 30 minutes to determine the peak power consumption while letting the card sit at a stable Windows desktop for 30 minutes to determine the peak idle power consumption. We have also included several other tests as well.

Please note that after extensive testing, we have found that simply plugging in a power meter to a wall outlet or UPS will NOT give you accurate power consumption numbers due to slight changes in the input voltage. Thus we use a Tripp-Lite 1800W line conditioner between the 120V outlet and the power meter.


The power consumption numbers shown by this card are nothing short of incredible. Even though it takes the GTS 250 1GB to the cleaner’s in the majority of the benchmarks, the HD 5770 consumes nearly 50W less when under full load. If this coupled with downright amazing idle power consumption doesn’t convince you that ATI is doing something right with the 40nm manufacturing process, we don’t know what will.