Testing Methodology and System Setup
To borrow from our own Radeon HD 5870 article on testing configurations:It had been quite a long time since we took the time to completely revamp our GPU test bed and with both this AMD release and the pending NVIDIA technology shift we thought it provided a good chance to do so. Not only that, but the move to Windows 7 also seemed to make sense as I think it will quickly become the OS of choice for gamers. Of course the success we had using Windows 7 on our CPU testbed for the recent Intel Lynnfield CPU launch didn’t hurt matters either as the OS proved to be stable and to perform very well.
The hardware itself remained mostly unchanged though I did decide to upgrade the Core i7-920 CPU to the Core i7-965 just to keep things moving. The motherboard is the X58+nForce 200 based ASUS P6T6 WS Revolution motherboard that has support for four full PCIe 2.0 x16 slots and we load it with 6GB of DDR3 memory running at 1333 MHz.
The gaming titles are ones that I decided best reflected the direction that PC games are going for the next year or so. We kept both Far Cry 2 and World in Conflict in the mix because of their popularity and benchmarking prowess but then added in a trio of new titles. Tom Clancy’s H.A.W.X turned out to be a very impressive gaming both in terms of visual quality and technology working behind the scene. Both Batman: Arkham Asylum and Resident Evil 5 are brand new games, released within weeks of this article and very impressive games from a graphical stand point. (Side note: you should really be playing Batman…)
Okay, so GPU-Z doesn’t help us much on these yet…
For our testing we have broken the results up into two sets: one for the Radeon HD 5770 and one for the HD 5750. The HD 5770 is being compared to a CrossFire configuration of HD 5770s, a GeForce GTX 260+ and a GeForce GTS 250. Current pricing on the GTX 260+ put it at about $170 or so while the GTX 250 can be found for around $130. Since the MSRP on the HD 5770 should be around $159 those are the most relevant comparisons from the NVIDIA camp.
On the battle for the HD 5750, I have pitted it against the Radeon HD 4850 (currently selling around $100), the GeForce GTS 250 and the GeForce 9800 GT (that can be found for about $99). That gives the HD 5750 (MSRP of $109) a good healthy competitive position.
- Testing Configuration
- ASUS P6T6 WS Revolution X58 + nForce 200
- Intel Core i7-965 @ 3.33 GHz
- 3 x 2GB Corsair DDR3-1333 MHz
- Intel X25-M G2 160GB SSD
Now let’s get to some test results!
