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The Asus EAH5750 Formula is supplied in an attractively designed blue accented box with a particular focus on the cooling system.
The box opens up to reveal detailed information on the cooling system and Heatsink with Micro Surface Treatment Technology. There are also details on the Durable Dust Proof fan system which apparently translates to 25% longer life. Basically the system protects the fan bearings from dust by sealing specific areas around the fan, so it could very well be a reasonably realistic claim.
Asus bundle manuals, power cable converters (2 molex to 1 PCIe power) and a Crossfire cable as well as a few CD's with drivers (well out of date now) and product information. No games are included.
Asus can certainly claim that no other cooler looks quite like this – it is shaped to resemble a Formula racing car – which will assuredly appeal to many users.
Above, a slightly different angle which shows the mounting locations for the plastic shroud and the heatsink design underneath. Asus state that the Formula runs 13% cooler than the reference design card. The fan is very quiet under normal conditions but we will look into this later in more detail.
On the rear we have DVI, VGA and HDMI connectivity which covers most bases for the majority of the audience.
The HD5750 isn't too much of a power hog, only needing a simple 6 pin power connector – for those interested the card requires 86 watts of power which is 11 watts more than the PCI e x16 slot can deliver.
The chip that powers the HD5750 is called Juniper – basically half of an HD5800 series which is codenamed Cypress. This contains around 1.04 billion transistors and takes up around 166mm of die space. The 5750 features 720 stream units, 9 SIMDs and 36 texture units with 16 ROPs.
Clock speeds on the HD5750 are 700mhz Core and the 1GB of GDDR5 memory is clocked at 1150mhz which translates to 4.6ghz effective. Even though its only a 128 bit bus, the bandwidth is a respectable 73.6 GB/s. Power drain of the HD5750 is a cost effective 86 watts at full load. Compare this to a whopping 150 watt consumption of the last generation 4850 and it all starts to fall into place – the 5 series is a very efficient series of cards. At idle for instance the HD5750 only consumes 16 watts thanks to an aggressive transistor design which gates and down clocks very effectively.
The Formula card is not supplied overclocked however Asus do provide several software suites which allow for the option of manual overclocking. SmartDoctor is the tool of choice for Asus and it offers hardware monitoring and overclocking options. Sadly it is limited in design to 780mhz on the core so we won't be using it later in our overclocking testing.
As with most Asus products, the engineering attention to detail is exceptional. The PCB is a custom Asus design with solid caps used throughout and we noticed that prices seemed to around the same as reference designed cards which is surely a big selling point!
