Sapphire HD5750 1G GDDR5 graphics card

The Sapphire ATI Radeon HD 5750 1GB GDDR5 is an affordable mid-range graphics card that refuses to skimp on gaming prowess. As its name implies, the ATI Radeon HD 5750 is a stripped down version of the ATI Radeon HD 5850. While not nearly as powerful as its high-end sibling, it remains a pretty capable graphics card in its own right. It is suited to intensive 3D applications and high-end gaming, with support for Eyefinity and DirectX 11.

Architecture, heating and connectivity

The ATI Radeon HD 5750 is built using the same 40nm manufacturing process as the HD 5850, although it uses a 128-bit GDDR5 memory interface (as opposed to 256-bit). The HD 5850’s 725MHz core clock has dropped to 700MHz, while the memory clock speed now stands at 1.15GHz (4800MHz effective). The number of stream processors has also been snipped, falling from 1600 to just 720. Despite these significant hardware concessions, the ATI Radeon HD 5750 is still very impressive — especially for the asking price. It’s also cooler and more energy-efficient than its bulkier siblings.

As expected, Sapphire has stuck rigidly to the ATI reference board specifications for this model (a beefed up "Vapor-X" edition is available for a higher premium). However, the card’s cooling has been significantly overhauled via an aluminium heatsink and a larger fan that dominates the centre of the graphics card.

If you’d prefer not to deck out your PC with an extensive cooling solution, the Sapphire ATI Radeon HD 5750 1GB GDDR5 is an excellent choice. When under load, it peaked at 60 degrees Celsius — a far cry from the triple digits that previous ATI cards were known for. When idle, the Sapphire ATI Radeon HD 5750 1GB GDDR5 stayed at a very reasonable 35 degrees Celsius.

The Sapphire ATI Radeon HD 5750 is compatible with DirectX 11 games and applications, which effectively makes it future-proof for the next few years. In addition, the HD 5750 supports Eyefinity technology which allows a single card to output visuals to up to six displays. In other words, it is still a very able gaming card, despite the low asking price.

For connectivity, the Sapphire ATI Radeon HD 5750 comes with two DVI-I connectors and an HDMI port, as well as the DisplayPort used by ATI’s Eyefinity technology. The Sapphire ATI Radeon HD 5750 1GB GDDR5 requires a single six-pin PCI-E power connector to run: this cuts down on cable clutter if you plan to install multiple cards into your PC chassis. (Like all Series 5 ATI cards, the HD 5750 takes up two slots on your PC.)

Benchmarks

We ran our benchmarks on a Vista 64-bit machine running an Intel Core i7 965, 6GB of DDR3 RAM and a Western Digital VelociRaptor (WD3000GLFS) hard drive, installed in an Antec Skeleton case. We then compared the results to other graphics cards we’ve reviewed in the same testbed. Unless otherwise stated, we have used the DirectX 10 version of each game, with maximum settings enabled:

The Sapphire HD5750 1GB GDDR5 did a pretty good job in our benchmarks. It will struggle to play the latest DirectX 11 games with maximum settings enabled, but that’s to be expected from a card in this price range. Indeed, for the same price as a single Asus ATI Radeon HD 5750 1GB, you could buy two of these babies and set them up in a CrossFire configuration for a huge boost in performance.

The Sapphire HD5750 1GB GDDR5 comes bundled with Colin McRae's DIRT 2 (via a free digital download) and ATI's Catalyst Control Centre.

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