Article Index Review: Gigabyte Radeon HD 5770 Silent Cell 1Gb Specifications and Features Photo Gallery Installation and Test Setup GPU-Z and Everest 3D Mark Vantage and Heaven DX11 AvP and Stone Giant DX11 Verdict and Conclusion

Introduction

For many years, Gigabyte have been great innovators for producing award-winning products. They were among the first to introduce energy saving technologies in the form of DES, and then there was the Ultra Durable feature which improved stability and longevity of the product. And later, Gigabyte introduced the 2oz copper PCB design, which was pretty controversial at that time, but was later adopted (or copied) by other manufacturers. Another great innovative feature which Gigabyte introduced on their graphic cards, was the Silent Cell cooling technology, which was introduced early last year.

Today, we take a look at the Gigabyte Radeon HD 5770 Silent Cell (1Gb GDDR5) graphics card. It utilises the AMD Radeon HD 5770 GPU, which is slightly overclocked at 875Mhz (default speed is 850Mhz), and features 1Gb of GDDR5 ram (with a 128-bit memory interface) clocked 50Mhz higher at 1250Mhz (effective 5000Mhz). The card also feature Gigabyte's Ultra Durable VGA technology, which includes the 2oz copper PCB design, Japanese solid capacitors, Tier1 memory, Lower RDS(on) Mosfets and Ferrite Core chokes. It's the same of of kind technology they use for their motherboards, and it all sounds very impressive. According to Gigabyte, it's the World's only silent solution for HD 5770 in the market ... it's quite a claim, but I think so far it's true.

Moving on to the main feature of the graphics card ... and that's the innovative Silent Cell VGA cooling technology from Gigabyte. This new cooling technology allows Gigabyte to produce graphic cards that's passively cooled and require NO fans, and therefore totally silent. To cope with the excess heat and to provide effective heat dissaption, the new Silent Cell heatsink has an "ultra-huge" copper base increasing the surface area by upto 57.82% (according to Gigabyte). What's more, there are a total of 4 heatpipes and 2 additional array of aluminum fins. All of these feature can provide upto 36.5% lower in GPU temperature. Sounds very impressive ... we shall see if this Silent Cell really works, as I know that Radeon GPUs can get extremely hot under full load.

AMD's Radeon HD 5770 is nothing new. As mentioned before in our previous reviews, the GPU is based on 40nm technology and features 800 Stream processing units, 40 texture units and 24x anti-aliasing modes. It also natively supports DX11, GDDR5, CrossfireX and Eye-Finity. In terms of performance, it's not the fastest GPU around, but it has its place in the market and is aimed mostly at the mainstream users.

We've already looked at the HIS Radeon HD 5770 IceQ5 (1Gb GDDR5) last month, and we thought that the overall performance was OK for a mainstream card. We don't the expect the Gigabyte Radeon HD 5770 Silent Cell to be any better, as it uses the same GPU as the HIS Radeon HD 5770 IceQ5. However, the main attraction with the Gigabyte Radeon HD 5770 SL is the Silent Cell technology. It's perfect for any mainstream user who cherish silence ... be it a gamer or your average SOHO user.

We'll be testing the Gigabyte Radeon HD 5770 Silent Cell (1Gb GDDR5) on our test rig, which consists of the following ... Intel Core i5 - 650 (LGA 1156), Gigabyte P55 USB3, 4Gb Crucial Ballistix Tracer, Noctua NH-C12P SE14 CPU cooler and a Silverpower 650w power supply. All-in-all, a decently spec'd computer system.

OK, let's not waste any more time and take a closer look at the specifications of the Gigabyte Radeon HD 5770 SL (1Gb GDDR5) ...