Introduction

HIS Radeon HD 5750 ICEQ+If we draw any conclusions from the fourth quarter of 2009 then the biggest surprise has to be the Radeon HD series 5000 launch. If anything that was the product series with the biggest technology advancement. From top to bottom the Radeon 5000 product line drips with either performance or massive value and features. One of the cheapest mainstream Radeon series your money can get you is the Radeon HD 5750. It oozes with bang for buck really.

It's a product that performance wise positions itself next to the Radeon HD 4850 and the GeForce GTS 250, yet now with superior features at an attractive price

So what's the buzz for series 5000? Well, ATI has been focusing on three primary features and key selling points for the series 5000 products. First off, the new graphics adapters are of course DirectX 11 ready. With Windows 7 and Vista being DX11 ready, all we need are some games to take advantage of DirectCompute, multi-threading, Hardware Tessellation and new shader 5.0 extensions. DX11 is going to be good. More on that later on in this article of course.

Another big feature of the product that you already learned about is of course Eyefinity, the ability to connect one to up-to six monitors (depending on AIC/AIB choices in outputs) to your videocard and use it in a desktop environment, or to create an incredible wide monitor resolution to play games in. It's nice, it is niche and yes... certainly not an option many of you will use... but really it is breathtaking as well. We'll explain this in a separate chapter.

The third big and prominent feature is of course performance for money. It's new, it's affordable, it has AMD written all over it. It is now a few weeks after the official launch, and though bad yields at TSMC are hindering sales, slowly but steadily the product starts to arrive in the stores as more volume becomes available.

HIS took the Radeon HD 5750 and decided to make a more exclusive deal for you out of it. They launched an ICEQ+ version that comes with customized silent cooling, they have thrown in DiRT 2 (the full PC game) for free and added a little more, bringing value to what is supposed to be a mainstream product.

Head on over to the next page where we'll meet and greet Juniper aka Radeon HD series 5700 and find out what HIS brings to the table.