In recent weeks, ATI has continued to roll out its "Evergreen" Radeon HD 5 series range of DirectX 11 graphics cards. The Nvidia v. ATI rivalry that has existed in previous GPU ranges has been a non-starter with ATI able to set out its performance mainstream and lower end segment cards without response from Nvidia. Indeed, the Fermi cards are not due to hit the markets until late March, six months on from ATI's headline act -- the Radeon HD 5870.

The performance GPUs (5800 series and higher) make use of the Cypress chip architecture with the more mainstream cards using the smaller Juniper core. This mainstream segment of ATI's DirectX 11 range was filled with the joint launch of the HD 5770 and HD 5750. So what's the difference between the two 5700 cards? Effectively, the 5770 is the full-fat version of the Juniper chip making use of all ten of the SIMD cores with the 5750 trimmed down a little.

Today's review takes a look at the Sapphire Radeon HD 5770 to discover whether Juniper is able to deliver to the extent the Cypress chip was able to. Let's delve a little deeper...