Having recently purchased a new home computer and discovered the delights of running Windows 7 ultimate rather than the memory hungry Windows Vista I have been using for the last few years on my old PC I decided to improve the performance level of my new PC a little further by upgrading the graphics card. A few years back I used to play online games such as Quake III Arena and Unreal Tournament a lot online. This would require you to have a decent gaming PC and more importantly a powerful graphics card. I remember my first being the Nvidia Geforce 3 Ti 500. I would later switch allegiance to the ATI Radeon and then back to the Nvidia Geforce range. I stopped online gaming around 2005 and lost touch with the associated technology.

Anyway I digress.

So with my new PC I decided to once more give gaming a try. The card that came with my new PC would not cut the mustard so I went in search of one that would. Despite being away from the scene for over five years little had changed in that it was still a choice between an Nvidia or an ATI graphics card. I've probably had more Nvidia cards than ATI ones over the years but for some reason I always get sound quality issues when running Nvidia cards which I was keen to avoid this time. I'm not a serious gamer and my PC is used 90% of the time for work so I wasn't about to spend a fortune on this purchase. Initially I wanted something that would be up to playing Fallout 3 and Borderlands since I no longer have my PS3 I wanted to play those games on my PC now.

I first looked at cards around the £65 mark but after a little reading it soon became apparent that spending an extra £40 would get me a huge performance increase. The card that gained all the praise and best reviews was the Radeon 5770. I had previously had good experience with the Sapphire brand of ATI cards so I chose their version at just over £100 from dabs. When it arrived the box contained the card which was far larger than I anticipated (it will take up two slots) plus the driver disc and instruction manual. Two leads were also supplied one power and one CrossFire lead. It should be noted that this card will need at the very least a 600W power supply for it to function. Installation was very easy to do and what struck me straight away was just how quiet this card is when running.

Even when fully loaded playing Fallout 3 the card would not make any noise and now it is my PSU fan that is the noisiest component in my PC. All in all I am very happy with my purchase and would definitely recommend this card. Unlike cheaper cards the 5770 is designed as a DirectX 11 card. It is not for the serious gamer but for anyone else it makes a great purchase.

Sapphire RADEON HD 5770 Basic Specifications:

Clock Speed - 850 MHz
RAMDAC Clock Speed - 400 MHz
Video Memory - 1 GB
Technology - GDDR5 SDRAM 128-bit
Memory Clock Speed - 4.8 GHz
Features - ATI Stream Technology, ATI CrossFireX Technology
Max Resolution - 2560 x 1600 / 60 Hz
API Supported - DirectX 11, OpenGL 3.2
Max Monitors Supported - 3