Sapphire Vapor-X HD 5750 1GB GDDR5 graphics card review
Website design By BotEap.comINTRODUCTION
Website design By BotEap.comThe Radeon 5000 series of graphics cards was recently released by AMD / ATI and for the first time in a couple of years, AMD / ATI (hereafter AMD only) is again in the lead in performance. NVIDEA will release its next generation of graphics cards quite soon, but a date has not been set and very little information about it has been leaked to the press.
Website design By BotEap.comJust a couple of weeks ago, AMD released the 5850 and 5870 graphics cards which were very well received by critics and consumers. I did a review of an Asus 5850 card myself.
Website design By BotEap.comJust a couple of weeks later, AMD released the HD 5970, which is a dual GPU card codenamed “Hemlock”, a very powerful and expensive card. You can check the reviews on testseek.com about it. Here’s the current AMD lineup:
Website design By BotEap.comI already discussed the news with the Radeon 5000 series in my Asus HD 5850 review, so I am not going to repeat the whole thing again. Suffice it to say, the new generation has some great new features. First, the chips are made with the new 40nm technology that promises lower power consumption and less heat. Second, ATI EyeFinity technology allows up to three monitors to be connected to each card, which means a total of 6 monitors in CrossFireX. Other important features are ATI Stream (GPU acceleration), Open CL (API for GPU-CPU parallel processing) and Directx 11 support.
Website design By BotEap.comENGINEERING SPECIFICATIONS: SAPPHIRE VAPOR-X HD5750 1GB DDR5
Website design By BotEap.comOK, enough is enough; Let’s take a look at the specifications of the Sapphire HD 5750 Vapor-X 1GB DDR5:
Website design By BotEap.comSapphire 5750 HD Steam 1 GB DDR5
Website design By BotEap.comJuniper PRO GPU (Radeon HD 5870)
Website design By BotEap.com40nm technology
Website design By BotEap.com720 stream processors
Website design By BotEap.comTexture Units 36
Website design By BotEap.comROP 16
Website design By BotEap.comGPU speed 710 Mhz (700 Mhz HD 5750)
Website design By BotEap.comMemory 1GB GDDR5 (1GB / 512MB GDDR5 HD 5750)
Website design By BotEap.comMemory speed 4640 Mhz (4600 Mhz)
Website design By BotEap.com128 bit bus width
Website design By BotEap.comMemory bandwidth 108GB / s
Website design By BotEap.comSteam cooling system, double slot
Website design By BotEap.com2 DVI-I connectivity
Website design By BotEap.comHDMI
Website design By BotEap.comDisplayport
Website design By BotEap.comCrossFireX Compatibility Yes
Website design By BotEap.comExternal Power Connectors 1 x 6 pin PCI-E
Website design By BotEap.comMaximum power consumption 108W (load) / 18W (rest)
Website design By BotEap.comSupported technologies DirectX 11, DirectX 10.1n, ATI Power Play, ATI Avivo, DXVA 1.0 and 2.0, Open GL 3.2 (G.), Dolby True HD and DTS-HD Audio Masters, ATI Stream, ATI Eyefinity.
Website design By BotEap.comFIRST PRINTS: 5750 SAPPHIRE VAPOR-X HD 1GB DDR5
Website design By BotEap.comIn the box, Sapphire emphasizes Vapor-X technology and all of the new AMD technologies discussed above.
Website design By BotEap.comThe card is secured in a cardboard box and enclosed by the usual antistatic plastic bag.
Website design By BotEap.comThe accessories included are: a manual; a CD with drivers and utilities; the “ArcSoft SimHD” application; a coupon to download the Dirt2 game (DirectX 11 compatible); 2 molex to 6-pin PCIe adapter cables; a DVI-VGA adapter and a CrossFireX bridge.
Website design By BotEap.comIN DETAIL: SAPPHIRE VAPOR-X HD 5750 VAPOR-X 1GB DDR5
Website design By BotEap.comThe card itself looks really impressive with its massive cooling solution. I’ve had the opportunity to see models of the 5750 from various manufacturers and the Sapphire card stands out.
Website design By BotEap.comThe cooling solution occupies a dual slot, which can be a disadvantage because this card should be classified as a mid-range card and many users prefer single slot cards in this segment. AMD / ATI sets the rules of thumb by which manufacturers can build their cards and they often leave pretty small margins, which I suppose must be the reason I haven’t seen a 5750 single slot card yet.
Website design By BotEap.comThe technology used by the Vapor-X cooling system has its origins in the aerospace industry. The cooling liquid (in this case water) turns to vapor on a hot surface (the GPU) and the resulting vapor condenses when it comes in contact with a cooler surface which turns the vapor back into liquid and returns to the hot surface again and so the process repeats. Sapphire claims that the Vapor-X system is much more effective than the reference cooling system, up to 7 degrees.
Website design By BotEap.comIn the right hands, less heat means less noise. And this is also another feature of the Vapor-X system.
Website design By BotEap.comTo help the Vapor-X system cool down the liquid circulating inside it, Sapphire has installed an 80mm fan that integrates seamlessly with the black plastic cap. One side of the plastic cover has the Sapphire logo that glows blue when the system is running. Look at the image below to see what I’m talking about.
Website design By BotEap.comThe “Black Diamond” capacitors that caused quite a stir in the industry are included in this card. The aluminum polymer in these capacitors is superior to that used in “normal” aluminum capacitors. According to Sapphire, these capacitors are 25% more energy efficient than normal capacitors.
Website design By BotEap.comThe card has an additional 6-pin PCIe power connector, as you can see in the image below.
Website design By BotEap.comThe current 5750 has two CrossFireX connections although due to the inefficiency of the Catalyst controllers, installing more than two cards is not recommended.
Website design By BotEap.comThe memory units are visible on the PCB of this card. It’s four high-quality Hynix GDDR5 chips.
Website design By BotEap.comThere are four video outputs on this card, two standard DVI-I; an HDMI and a DisplayPort. This should satisfy the needs of even the most demanding users. The card is only 185mm long and therefore fits in most cases.
Website design By BotEap.comTEST SYSTEM
Website design By BotEap.comThese are the components of my test system:
Website design By BotEap.comTest equipment
Website design By BotEap.comIntel Core 2 Quad Processor 9300 @ 3,245 Ghz
Website design By BotEap.comZalman CNPS9900A LED CPU Cooler
Website design By BotEap.comGigabyte EP45C-DS3R motherboard
Website design By BotEap.comSapphire HD 5750 Vapor-X 1GB GDDR5 graphics card
Website design By BotEap.comIntegrated sound card
Website design By BotEap.comOCZ Reaper HPC Ed DDR2 1150 2 × 2GB Memory (5-6-6-18)
Website design By BotEap.comSeagate Barracuda 7200.12 500 GB Hard Drive
Website design By BotEap.comCorsair HX850W Power Supply
Website design By BotEap.comCase Cooler Master 690 PURE
Website design By BotEap.comOperating system and software
Website design By BotEap.comWindows 7 64-bit operating system
Website design By BotEap.comCatalyst 9.11 System Drivers
Website design By BotEap.comDirectX August 2009
Website design By BotEap.com3D Mark 06 Benchmarking Software
Website design By BotEap.com3D Mark Vantage
Website design By BotEap.comFurmark 1.7
Website design By BotEap.comUnigyne Heaven Benchmark
Website design By BotEap.comThe Last Remnant Games
Website design By BotEap.comTom Clancy’s Hawx
Website design By BotEap.comStreet fighter iv
Website design By BotEap.comEvil V reside
Website design By BotEap.comWeak can cry 4
Website design By BotEap.comClear Sky Stalker
Website design By BotEap.comWEAPON 2
Website design By BotEap.comShout 2 of the Revolutionary Armed Forces Officers Club
Website design By BotEap.comCrysis Warhead
Website design By BotEap.comOther software CPU-Z 1.49
Website design By BotEap.comGPU-Z 0.3.7
Website design By BotEap.comOCCT 3.1
Website design By BotEap.comHere are screenshots of my test system setup:
Website design By BotEap.comBENCHMARKING TESTS
Website design By BotEap.comUnfortunately I received this card too late to be able to test it on my old test system where I did a lot of graphics card testing. This means that I will have to comment out the numbers without having actual references to the previous test results. I will try to be as objective as possible.
Website design By BotEap.comIt’s no secret that AMD cards often score surprisingly high in FutureMark benchmarking programs (3D Mark 06 and 3D Mark Vantage). And this time it was no exception, as you can see in the graphs above.
Website design By BotEap.comThe DirectX 10 and Direct 11X Unigine tests were interesting to me due to the results I got from the same tests on the Asus HD5850 card a couple of weeks ago. One of the main marketing points of DirectX 11 is that it is supposed to be much faster than its predecessor. With the HD 5850 I got the opposite results and, as you can see from the graphs above, the same is true with the 5750 card. Obviously, AMD is having problems here. Hopefully, we will see improvements with the release of new Catalyst drivers.
Website design By BotEap.comGAMES I
Website design By BotEap.comThe performance of the Radeon HD 5750 is spectacular. It is capable of maintaining a high FPS rate with all the games in this first series. It had no problems when I increased the resolution and turned on the filters. The fact that it includes 1GB of GDDR5 with a bandwidth of 108GB / s should be what ultimately keeps games smooth even with filters turned on.
Website design By BotEap.comGAMES II
Website design By BotEap.comIn the second battery of games that includes the most demanding games, the limitations of the HD 5750 come to light. Although it does not prevent us from enjoying the games fully, it is clear that it is a mid-range card. In favor of the HD 5750 it is necessary to say that even the incredibly powerful HD 5850 had some problems with these games with all the settings maxed out. Considering that the HD 5850 has twice the number of stream processors compared to the HD5750, it is fair to say that the HD 5750 is a very powerful card.
Website design By BotEap.comOVERCLOCKING, COOLING AND ENERGY CONSUMPTION
Website design By BotEap.comThe launch of the HD 5750 brings power to the mid-range segment. So far, I haven’t said much about its overclocking capabilities, but reports from other reviews and forums have been positive. So I was really looking forward to testing an HD 5750 card and seeing that the overclocking potential really was as good as I had heard. I can’t deny that I was even happier when I learned that I could test an HD 5750 with Vapor-X technology.
Website design By BotEap.comIn fact, the overclocking ability of this card is high. See the following screenshots I got without modifying the voltages, but only using the Catalyst Control Center.
Website design By BotEap.comAfter trying countless combinations, I received a stable setting at 860Mhz for the GPU and 1345MHz for the memories. This means an increase from the default numbers of 23% for the GPU and 17% for the memories (the percentages were calculated based on the values for the reference model with 700 MHz for the GPU and 1150 MHz for the memories).
Website design By BotEap.comThe Vapor-X cooling system obviously does a fantastic job. In the following graph you can see the temperatures when the card is in IDLE and FULL LOAD modes. The idle temperatures were measured after the system had been running for half an hour with no load. The FULL CHARGE numbers were taken after the system was fully charged (using Furmark 1.7) for half an hour. The ambient temperature was 17 ° C.
Website design By BotEap.comVapor-X technology clearly does a lot to keep temperatures low. It’s been a long time since I’ve seen these low numbers under full load. I say it again; the Vapor-X does a great job.
Website design By BotEap.comIt is always difficult to talk about the noise level, as it is something very subjective. The fan can be set manually or automatically. During my overclocking, the fan was set to regulate itself and was spinning at 50% of maximum speed. I think the noise it made at these levels is perfectly fine, but when it goes up it becomes noticeable and somewhat annoying.