Sapphire HD 5770 FLEX Review - PAGE 3

Closer Look:

The Sapphire HD 5770 FLEX's cooler uses dual copper heatpipes as well as dust resisting sealed ball bearings in order to keep the card nice and cool. The part of the cooler that actually comes into contact with the Juniper core is the ever friendly copper. From there heat will be carried through the heatpipes into an array of finned aluminum. The cooler looks as though it can dissipate a large amount of heat, but I do have one complaint about it. The cooler seemed to be blowing air, not out of the expansion bracket, but out of the back. In other words, the cooler was releasing all of the hot air back into the case. With the cooler removed we can clearly see the Juniper core. This baby is stock clocked at 850Mhz, but should still offer a great amount of performance. Surrounding the Juniper core are the remaining four Samsung memory modules.

Overclocking:

Overclocking is one of those things that once you start, you'll never be able to stop. So of course we'll have to see how well the Sapphire HD 5770 FLEX overclocks. I started off by just working the card's core clock. I was soon able to hit 960, which is the max in the CCC. MSI's Afterburner wouldn't let me push any further then 960, so I was forced to stop. Using a different program would, however, allow you to continue. I then began working on the memory. I was, unfortunately unable to max out the Sapphire HD 5770 FLEX's memory. In fact, at 1395MHz I started seeing artifacts in my stress test. I then began lowering the clock speed by increments of 1MHz until I could successfully run MSI's Afterburner for 15 minutes without any instabilities. This came out to a memory clock of 1392MHz, which isn't to shabby. So in the end we were able to get a 110MHz overclock on the Core, and a 192MHz overclock on the memory, not bad.