Last month AMD unleashed what went on to become the earth'south fastest unmarried-GPU graphics card past a convincing margin, the Radeon Hd 5870. This was followed soon by a slightly watered-down version known as the Radeon Hard disk 5850. The latter has proved to exist very competitive, playing second merely to its bigger blood brother and at only $260, it stands without a doubtfulness as the best value high performance offer available at the moment.

Standing with the successful rollout of its Radeon HD 5000 series, AMD is now moving to attack the sub-$200 market, and hopes to go on the momentum going with the Radeon HD 5770 and 5750. Codenamed Juniper XT and Juniper LE, respectively, the first is said to cost but $160, while the lower-end 5750 will cost betwixt $110 and $130 depending on retentiveness configuration.

We've been particularly interested in the ATI Radeon Hd 5770, as last generation'due south Radeon Hd 4770 was one of our all-time favorite budget graphics cards. Although it came belatedly in the game, its excellent performance and operating efficiency earned it an "Outstanding" marking, making information technology the summit selection in the $100 range. We certainly expect to run into this new series live up to those standards.

But before we become to the benching concern, there are a few things to exist noted about the Radeon Hard disk drive 5770. Offset off, at $160 it is 38% cheaper than the Radeon HD 5850, but it also has 40% less retention bandwidth at its disposal. This is largely due to the memory motorcoach width existence cutting in half. The core configuration of the 5770 is also about 46% lighter, featuring fewer stream processor units, texture address and rasterization operator units.

Looking at pure raw specifications we expect the Radeon HD 5770 to be around forty% slower than the Radeon HD 5850. In other words, the Radeon HD 5770 should perform close to the once high-stop 4870.

This should come as great news to gamers looking for a cheap upgrade. However, it is not previous generation Radeons that the 5770 has to worry about. Competing against it will be the similarly priced GeForce GTX 260. Despite the obvious disadvantages this year-old card carries, similar higher power consumption and lack of DirectX eleven back up, the GeForce GTX 260 is even so a very worthy contender. So how volition the 5770 compare?