Sapphire Radeon HD5570 1GB DDR3 Single & Crossfire 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.


There is actually a story behind the results you see above. Basically, it looks like the HD 5570 sample we have does run a bit hot but (and this is a big “but”), the sapphire card has an extremely low noise profile. On the other hand, the reference HD 5570 we used tended to make itself noticeable above all the other fans we had working. Its high-pitched wail was annoying to say the least so we are glad that Sapphire took it upon themselves to redesign the stock heatsink for slightly improved airflow characteristics.

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.


When it comes to the power consumption of the HD 5000-series of cards, we are continually amazed. In a single card configuration, the HD 5570 is one of the most efficient cards we have tested. However, when put into a Crossfire setup the law of diminishing returns rears it’s heard since power consumption gets pushed above a HD 5670 while not allowing for significantly higher framerates. It is also obvious that software Crossfire is bottlenecking the cards somewhere since we saw less than a 20W increase in power consumption after adding the second card.