ATI HD 5570 Review - PAGE 3

Hardware

• CPU: Intel Core i7 965 at 3.2 GHz (133x24)
• Motherboard:  MSI Eclipse (X58)
• Memory: 6 GB Mushkin HP3-12800 1600MHz DDR3 at 1333 MHz (9-9-9-24)
• Chassis: Thermaltake Armor
• Power Supply: Thermaltake Toughpower 1200W
• Hard Drive: 250 GB Seagate Barracuda 7200.10 SATA, w/16 MB cache
• CPU Cooler: Noctua NH-U 12
• OS: Vista-64,SP1

Here at Neoseeker, we generally review the higher-end, gaming cards. Unfortunately for this reason, we don't have as many lower-performance segment video cards available to compare for testing with the HD 5570. But we do have some.Today we'll be benching the HD 5570 against the HD 5450, the VisionTek HD 5750, an ATI HD 5670, a Gigabyte HD 5670, a ATI HD 4550, and a  Gigabyte GT 240.

Software

For the drivers, all the ATI cards used the Catalyst 10.1 drivers except for the HD 5570, which used beta drivers,  and all the Nvidia cards used Forceware 196.21 drivers.

We have updated our benchmarks. Here are the new ones:

FTL_Blunderbuss: This is a demoscene demo by the group Fairlight, which came in second in competition in October 2009. It makes very heavy use of particles, and is a good GPU workout.  We used FRAPS to measure the average framerates of a run through the program, running at 1680x1050, with 4xAA, and 'high' detail.

Resident Evil V: Capcom's latest zombie smasher has a great 'Fixed' in-game benchmark. We ran it at top quality at 2560x1600 in DX10 mode, with and without AA . 

In addition, we test with:

Bioshock: For this benchmark, all of the Detail settings were set to 'High'. All of the graphic option switches were set to 'On', with the exception of the following three settings: Vsync, Windowed mode, and Force Global Lighting. We used FRAPS to measure frame rate performance. The FRAPS run was 138 seconds, triggered from pulling the switch in the sub at game's beginning. The sub's dive involves many big models moving around, which should strain the GPUs and be a good measure of the game's engine.

Far Cry 2: This open-world FPS is great looking game that really puts the strain on a gaming rig. We used the built-in benchmarking tool, and the overall 'Very High' quality setting was used.

Furmark: This intensive, synthetic benchmark models a ring of fur. We benched at 1680x1050.

Street Fighter IV: You have probably heard of this famous fighting game. It has 3D graphics, but generally does not require much GPU horsepower to run well. We used Capcom's stand-alone PC benchmarking tool for our tests, and ran everything at its highest possible settings, using 4xAA, and the 'Watercolor' setting.

Unreal Tournament 3: We tested the game using a fly-through of the vehicle capture-the-flag map 'Suspense.'ShangriLa (map) running for 90 seconds. Details were set to 'High', and a AF setting of 16x was used.

World In Conflict: We used the built-in benchmark of the demo version of this game. We ran the benchmark in DX9 rendering mode, with a 'High' level of quality. For the AA testing, we used a setting of 4x, and a setting of 16x for AF.

If you would like any further information about our benchmark settings, feel free to ask us in the forums.