Powercolor HD5770 Vortex 1GB Review

Even though the Powercolor HD5770 Vortex comes supplied with overclocked settings we wanted to see how much further we could push it via manual overclocking. This is always a good indication of potential headroom, even though the results of this will vary from card to card. We initially left Catalyst Control Center to get its own maximum ratings.

Catalyst Control Center came up with the settings above, which were considerably ‘out'. After manually testing the card for several hours our maximum figures were 950mhz on the core and 1400mhz on the memory.

Anything over 950mhz on the core proved unstable, however the memory overhead was incredible. We successfully sustained a whopping 1400mhz (5.6ghz) overclock which is a huge increase over the 1225mhz (4.9ghz). We confirmed our results with MSI Afterburner and anything above 1400mhz caused artifacting onscreen.

Now that we have our maximum overclock we decided to try a couple of tests again to see how the overclocked speeds would affect the performance of the card.

Unigine recorded increases as expected but we are much more interested in the real world gaming improvements. Crysis Warhead increased by a considerable 3FPS with both minimum and average frame rates – this can actually help to smooth out some of the more intensive gaming sections. Very good results indeed.

With such a considerable overclock we wanted to recheck the temperatures to ensure they were still within safe parameters.

The temperatures rose by about 8 degrees but we noticed that the fan wasn't speeding up any higher than 40 percent, the same speeds with Furmark at reference clocks. Manually adjusting the fan or setting up profiles would help reduce temperatures, but clearly Powercolor are aiming for a mixture of cooling and noise levels. If you hate noise then this card is going to be a great first consideration.

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