Mainstream Offensive

What else can be said about ATI's newest Evergreen cards that haven't already been said? In a short span of a month, ATI has rolled out not just one, not two, but four new cards. We've already covered the hyper fast Radeon HD 5870, its less powerful sibling the HD 5850, and also the HD 5770. Today, we are turning our attention to the Radeon HD 5750, the HD 5770's little brother.

The Radeon HD 5750 follows ATI tradition in that it is essentially a stripped down version of the single GPU (Cypress XT) found in the Radeon HD 5870. The chip found in the HD 5750 has been codenamed Juniper LE and it features a mere 720 stream processors, 36 texture mapping units and 16 raster operator units. This is comparable to the HD 5770's 800 stream processors, 40 texture mapping units and 16 raster operator units, but no where close to what the HD 5870 packs.

Additionally, like the Radeon HD 5770, the Radeon HD 5750 was given only a 128-bit wide memory interface, which would certainly hamper performance. And where clock speeds are concerned, the core of the Radeon HD 5750 is running at 700MHz, whereas the memory is clocked at 4600MHz DDR, which is notably lower than the HD 5770's core clock speeds of 850MHz and memory clock speeds of 4800MHz DDR. While the HD 5750 might have less stream processors, texture mapping units and lower clock speeds, ATI says the chip is still capable of pushing out 1.008 teraFLOPs of pure compute power, which is a smidge more than what the previous generation Radeon HD 4850 could manage. Price points too seem to be in that ballpark with the new Radeon HD 5750 SKU pegged at a recommended price of US$129. Other specs and price comparisons are as documented in the table at the bottom.

Our Radeon HD 5750 comes courtesy of PowerColor. This is the PowerColor PCS HD 5750 Premium Edition, which comes with a custom cooler from cooling specialists ZEROtherm and also a redeemable copy of Dirt 2.

With its stripped down core and lower clock speeds, it will be intriguing to see how the Radeon HD 5750 performs against the other Evergreen series of cards, its predecessors, and against the competition from NVIDIA. But first, a quick look at its GPU-Z screenshot and how it stacks up against the competition.