Sapphire HD5770 Flex CrossfireX (3 screens) Review

Rating: 9.0.

If the emails we have been receiving for the last month have been anything to go by, the enthusiast gaming audience is warming to the thought of low cost multiple monitor configurations. We recently reviewed the mouth watering XFX HD5970 Black Edition Limited 4GB in CrossfireX, but as many people have pointed out, this is merely a toy for the rich.

A few months ago we looked at the Sapphire HD5770 Flex Edition which brought affordable multi monitor computing to the masses. On a gaming level, it goes without saying that at 5760×1080 a single HD5770 struggled with specific engines, but we were pleasantly surprised at the decent performance for the modest £170 asking price.

With the release of the nVidia GTX460, prices of the AMD HD5770 cards have dropped recently so we thought now would be a good time to try the Sapphire HD5770 Flex in a CrossfireX configuration – The Sapphire Flex HD5770 for example is now £140 inc vat, a great price. We are using three liyama ProLite E2472HDD LED screens for our testing today, fantastic quality screens which can be picked up today in the UK for £150 inc vat. Three 24″ LED screens for £450? Yes, please.

This means for around £700 you could buy yourself a Sapphire HD5770 Flex CrossfireX solution with three iilyama 24 inch LED screens! Less than the price of one XFX HD5970 Black Edition Limited 4GB card.

Better still if you already have a HD5770, then you only need to get a few more screens and the Sapphire HD5770 Flex. This card incidentally was the first product on the market to deliver a true SLS (Single Large Surface) work area without the need for costly active adapters. The majority of HD 5000 series cards with ATI Eyefinity support demand that the third monitor is Displayport compatible, or that an active Displayport to DVI or VGA adapter is used.

FeatureSet

• SAPPHIRE Flex Technology supports 3 displays without the requirement of DisplayPort monitors or Active DP adapters, and can support up to 4 displays with the use of a DisplayPort monitor or Active adapter.
• Microsoft DirectX® 11 Support
  • Shader Model 5.0 Support
  • Direct Compute 11
  • Programmable hardware tessellation unit
  • Accelerated multi-threading
  • HDR texture compression
  • Order-independent transparency
• 1.04 billion 40nm transistors
• 800 Stream Processing Units
• OpenGL 4.0 support
• ATI Eyefinity Technology
• ATI Stream acceleration technology
  • OpenCL 1.0 compliant
  • DirectCompute 11
  • Accelerated video encoding, transcoding, and upscaling
• 2nd Generation TeraScale Engine
• PCI Express 2.1 x16 bus interface
• Advanced 1GB/128-bit GDDR5 memory interface
• HDMI 1.3 support with Deep Color and 7.1 High Bitrate Audio
• On chip HDCP Support
• ATI CrossFireX™ multi-GPU support for highly scalable performance. (Use up to four discrete cards with an AMD 790/890FX based motherboard)
• ATI Avivo HD Support
  • ATI Unified Video Decoder 2 (UVD) for Blu-ray™ and HD Video.
  • Accelerated Video Transcoding (AVT)
  • DVD Upscaling
  • Dynamic Contrast
  • Built-in HDMI with 7.1 surround sound support
  • Support for H.264, VC-1 and MPEG-2
  • Dual Stream 1080p playback support
  • DXVA 1.0 & 2.0 support

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