Asus EAH5750 Formula Radeon HD 5750 review

1. Introduction2. The Asus EAH5750 Formula card3. Testing Methodology4. Colin McRae Dirt 25. Fallout 36. Far Cry 27. Crysis Warhead8. Left 4 Dead 29. Temperatures10. Power Drain11. Overclocking12. Closing Thoughts13. View All Pages

Asus are one of the largest and most successful technology companies on the planet right now – producing some of the finest motherboards known to man with particular emphasis on engineering and build quality.  All these efforts do not go unnoticed by the enthusiast however as their annual turnover is always billions of dollars.

Not many people would argue that the AMD 5xxx series has been an incredible success … fantastic performance, wicked DX11 capabilities while still managing to remain competitively priced. In the latest of our articles to focus on graphics cards with proprietary cooling systems we look at a product called the Formula HD5750. Yep, if you look closer you will see that the cooler is shaped to resemble a Formula race car.

The Asus Formula HD5750 features 1GB of GDDR5 memory and Asus claim it runs 13% cooler than the reference design. Let's take a look ….

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power cable converters (2 molex to 1 PCIe power) and a Crossfire cable as well as a few CD's with drivers (well out of date now) and product information.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!

When testing a card such as the HD5750 it is important to use comparable partnering equipment. It would be easy for us to slot in a 980X Intel CPU with a Rampage III Extreme motherboard, but that doesn't really seem very practical for the target audience. It is all about correctly gauging the price points. We are including an nVidia GTS250 1GB board for comparison purposes as it shares a similar price point around £100.

Test System:
Asus HD5750 Formula Video Card
nVidia GTS 250 1GB
Intel Core I5 750 CPU
4GB Crucial DDR1333 Ram
Asus P7P55D-E Motherboard
Noctua NH D14 Cooler
Coolermaster 700W PSU
Western Digital 1TB 7,200HD
Dell2309 Monitor
Silverstone Raven 2 Chassis

Thermal Diodes
Raytek Laser Temp Gun 3i LSRC/MT4 Mini Temp

Windows 7 64 bit Ultimate
Fraps Professional
Forceware 197.45
Catalyst 10.4

Colin McRae Dirt 2
Fallout 3
Far Cry 2
Crysis Warhead
Left4Dead 2

All the latest bios updates and drivers are used during testing. We perform under real world conditions, meaning KitGuru test all games across five closely matched runs and average out the results to get an accurate median figure. We mix and match various games across our reviews to try and keep our regular readers interested – no one wants to see the same five games used in every review.

Colin McRae: Dirt 2 (known as Dirt 2 outside Europe and stylised, DiRT) is a racing game released in September 2009, and is the sequel to Colin McRae: Dirt. This is the first game in the McRae series since McRae’s death in 2007. It was announced on 19 November 2008 and features Ken Block, Travis Pastrana, Tanner Foust, and Dave Mirra. The game includes many new race-events, including stadium events. Along with the player, an RV travels from one event to another, and serves as ‘headquarters’ for the player. It features a roster of contemporary off-road events, taking players to diverse and challenging real-world environments. The game takes place across four continents: Asia, Europe, Africa and North America. The game includes five different event types: Rally, Rallycross, ‘Trailblazer,’ ‘Land Rush’ and ‘Raid.’ The World Tour mode sees players competing in multi-car and solo races at new locations, and also includes a new multiplayer mode.

This engine support DX11 and was one of the integral releases for ATI when they launched the 5xxx series cards a while ago. Hardware tessellation is used on the crowd, as well as water and cloth objects. DirectCompute 11 accelerated high definition ambient occulsion is also integrated with full floating point high dynamic range lighting.

We attempted to use the highest possible settings to get playable frame rates from Dirt 2 and we settled on 1920×1200 with 16AF in DX11 mode with high settings ingame. This ensures that we are using the new DX11 featureset, one of the selling points of this particular board. The GTS 250 is running in DX9 mode at ultra settings – obviously as there is no DX11 support for this card these settings are not identical.

The Dirt 2 experience on the modest HD5750 is very impressive overall, especially considering we are using a high resolution and running in full DX11 mode – the frame rates never dip into the KitGuru danger zone. A  portion of the prospective audience wouldn't be gaming at such a high resolution on this card so figures would be higher.

Fallout 3 takes place in the year 2277, 36 years after the setting of Fallout 2 and 200 years after the nuclear apocalypse that devastated the game's world in a future where international conflicts culminated in a Sino-American war in the second half of the 21st century. The game places the player in the role of an inhabitant of Vault 101, a survival shelter designed to protect a small number of humans from the nuclear fallout. When the player's character's father disappears under mysterious circumstances, he or she is forced to escape from the Vault and journey into the ruins of Washington D.C. to track him down. Along the way the player is assisted by a number of human survivors and must battle myriad enemies that now inhabit the area now known as the “Capital Wasteland”. The game has an attribute and combat system typical of an action strategy game but also incorporates elements of first-person shooter and survival horror games.

Fallout 3 is still being played by many gamers and we felt it was an interesting inclusion in this review to show HD5750 performance at a high resolution with max AA settings. the HD5750 puts in a great set of results and is just outclassed slightly by the GTS 250.

The frame rates in Fallout 3 are generally well in excess of 30 which leads to a solid, smooth gaming experience. Only once during our gameplay period did we notice a dip just below 30fps. The smooth rate of 25fps however is held throughout testing.

Far Cry 2 (commonly abbreviated as “FC2 or “fc2″) is an open-ended first-person shooter developed by Ubisoft Montreal and published by Ubisoft. It was released on October 21, 2008 in North America and on October 23, 2008 in Europe and Australia. It was made available on Steam on October 22, 2008. Crytek, the developers of the original game, were not involved in the development of Far Cry 2.

Ubisoft has marketed Far Cry 2 as the true sequel to Far Cry, though the sequel has very few noticeable similarities to the original game. Instead, it features completely new characters and setting, as well as a new style of gameplay that allows the player greater freedom to explore different African landscapes such as deserts, jungles, and savannas. The game takes place in a modern-day East African nation in a state of anarchy and civil war. The player takes control of a mercenary on a lengthy journey to locate and assassinate “The Jackal,” a notorious arms dealer.

Far Cry 2 is an intensive open world game and the results above detail how close a match this engine is for both cards in a similar price bracket.

We have been impressed with the 5750 Formula cards performance in Far Cry 2 – not once did we notice a drop under 30fps throughout our testing.

Crysis Warhead, like the original, Crysis, is based in a future where an ancient alien spacecraft has been discovered beneath the Earth on an island east of the Philippines. The single-player campaign has the player assume the role of (Former SAS) Delta Force operator Sergeant Michael Sykes, referred to in-game by his call sign, Psycho. Psycho’s arsenal of futuristic weapons builds on those showcased in Crysis, with the introduction of Mini-SMGs which can be dual-wielded, a six-shot grenade launcher equipped with EMP grenades, and the destructive, short ranged Plasma Accumulator Cannon (PAX). The highly versatile Nanosuit returns.

In Crysis Warhead, the player fights North Korean and extraterrestrial enemies, in many different locations, such as a tropical island jungle, inside an “Ice Sphere”, an underground mining complex, which is followed by a convoy train transporting an unknown alien object held by the North Koreans, and finally, to an airfield. Like Crysis, Warhead uses Microsoft’s Direct3D 10 (DirectX 10) for graphics rendering.

Our testing was performed at 1280×1024 with mainstream settings.

The results are once again evenly matched with the HD5750 showing a more level frame rate. There are slightly lower peaks, but also higher minimum rates. Both cards are perfectly playable throughout.

At these settings the game is smooth across all our tested environments with the rate never dropping into the sub 30 zone.

Left 4 Dead 2 is a cooperative first-person shooter game. It is the sequel to Valve Corporation’s award-winning Left 4 Dead. The game launched on November 17, 2009, for Microsoft Windows and Xbox 360 in the United States; it launched November 20 in Europe. It builds upon the cooperatively-focused gameplay of the original and uses Valve’s proprietary Source engine, the same game engine used in Left 4 Dead. The game made its world premiere at E3 2009 with a trailer during the Microsoft press event.

In a similar fashion to the original, Left 4 Dead 2 is set during the aftermath of an apocalyptic pandemic, and focuses on four survivors fighting against hordes of the infected. The survivors must fight their way through levels, interspersed with safe houses that act as checkpoints, with the goal of reaching a rescue vehicle at the campaign’s finale.

The gameplay is procedurally altered by an artificial intelligence engine dubbed the “Director” that monitors the players’ performance and adjust the scenario to provide a dynamic challenge. Several new features have been introduced: new types of infected, melee weapons, and a story-arc that connects the game’s five campaigns together.

Another close match with both cards capturing almost identical rates through our tested game play sections.

Min frame rates show a fairly smooth curve with only a drop under 40 during heavy firefights. The maturity of the Catalyst drivers also help smooth out the performance.

We measured temperatures with various diodes and recorded the results after loading the cards in Crysis Warhead for 30 minutes. Room ambient temperatures were maintained via air conditioning at 25c throughout testing.

At idle, the card runs at the same temperature as a reference HD5750 and under load we initially recorded the same temperatures which was worrying. We checked the core of the Asus HD5750 and found that there was very little thermal paste present – it is hard to know if this issue was due to a previous reviewer or just a ‘glitch' during the card build. We rectified this by applying some standard paste and retesting – we also checked the reference card and used the same thermal paste to ensure as even a playing ground as possible. Again the temperatures were the same at idle, and 4c less under full load which is not a huge improvement.

Noise from both cards was identical, both quiet under general use, raising a little under extended load. Manually setting the fans to 100% on both created a similar whirlwind noise effect which is rather unpleasant.

We then tested the Asus video card system against an identical reference based card system and measured the drain at the wall – omitting external devices such as the monitor.

Interestingly, at idle the ASUS card consumes a little more power when idle, around 4W which rises to around 11w under full load. We would assume that this is due to the custom board design although it is hard to accurately ascertain without detailed schematics. As the card is not overclocked we would assume a slight voltage increase could be part of the reason.

The Asus HD5750 is supplied at 700mhz core clocks with memory at an effective 4.6ghz. We handled overclocking with the fan set to auto to keep noise to a minimum and found that we were able to squeeze considerably more from the board before errors started to occur.

The final figures we settled on were 840 mhz on the core and 1270mhz on the memory. As always with overclocking the results will vary from card to card but this shows a large amount of overhead and we would assume most cards would reach 800 core and 1250 memory easily enough. Figures worth taking into consideration if your game is currently just slightly juddery at the given settings.

We also overclocked our reference HD5750 and achieved 840mhz on the core and 1280mhz on the memory, slightly higher than the Asus board achieved.

The AMD HD5750 is a solid performer at a reasonable price and the Asus version delivered a really good DX11 experience in Dirt 2. Unfortunately we were left unimpressed with the custom cooler which only reduced temperatures by a few degrees … I was also unsure if the lack of paste on the card was due to a previous ‘reviewer' issue or a batch of cards not getting enough on the core. If you have one of these cards and are experiencing heat issues then it would be wise to remove the cooler and have a look yourself, its pretty easily rectified.

Even though the Asus card is reference clocked when we measured power draw at the wall we noticed that it was consuming more (11w under load), we would assume this is due to a design change on a custom PCB. Slightly increased voltages might also be raising the temperatures a little and negating benefits of a more advanced cooling system.

Even though the fan on the Asus HD5750 is 10mm larger (80mm compared to reference 70mm) we noticed no real reduction in overall noise levels either which was again, a little disappointing.

We admire the HD5750 series of cards however the Asus Formula version left us a little cold. While temperatures were slightly reduced, it wasn't really noticeable and the noise levels are pretty much on a par with the reference design. We like the look of the retro cooler but we also want to see proprietary solutions like this offering tangible benefits to the customer. If you see it for the same price as the reference HD5750 it is certainly worth consideration.

KitGuru Says: Asus always impress us, but the HD5750 Formula unfortunately didn't meet our expectations.

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