L O S T C I R C U I T S

Differentiation is one of the most important keys to success. In a sea of conformal offerings it doesn't matter whether any deviation finds the unanimous approval by everybody, which would be a paradox anyway, as long as it sets itself apart from the rest of the field. This strategy has worked well for ASUS in the past in any sector of their product offerings and by now the brand name is strong enogh to make about anything fly, just based on the fact that it is an ASUS product. Take the latest line-up of AMD graphics cards and there is a prime example. Every AMD partner is craving for attention by putting a sticker on their cards that still nevertheless follows the reference design. Of course there are contractual obligations and at the same time, the reference design is extremely well thought-out. But then, change is good, isn't it?

Would you like to supersize it? The catchphrase from MacDonalds has broken out of the fast food business and become the business model for about anything relating to goods and products or else services. Would you like to have fries with it? Or maybe a better cooling solution for your graphics card. Well, there we have it. I mean today's topic, featuring the latest offering from ASUS, namely the EAH5770 CuCore. Our last graphics article introduced ASUS 5750 Formula, without doubt one of the most attractive offerings in the graphics card market based on the AMD/ATI Juniper-Pro GPU. While the 5750 Formula is a formidable contender in the 1080P display format, there are some games where it is pushing the limits when all eye candy is enabled and or more than 2 x full screen antialiasing is selected.

ASUS EAH5750 Formula vs. ASUS EAH5770 CuCore

Bear in mind that the "Pro" version of the Juniper GPU has one of the 10 SIMD Units featured on the XT GPU disabled, and therefore only 720 Stream Processors are active along with 36 Texture Units whereas the actual die is identical to the one branded as Juniper XT featuring 800 Stream Processors and 40 Texture Units. Everything else being equal, the difference between the Pro and the XT version should, therefore, be roughly 10%, based on the assumption of linear scaling of performance with the number of processing units. A performance delta of 10% is not really a selling argument for a higher end graphics card, especially if the price delta is around 25%, thus, there is a need to make the supersize a bit more pronounced and throw in the 40 ounces drink in the form of a frequency bump.

Let's take a quick look at the Juniper Pro vs. XT in comparison to its big brethren, that is the Cypress Pro vs Cypress XT.

Radeon 5800 (Cypress) vs. 5700 (Juniper) Series Comparison

We already showed this table in our review of the ASUS EAH5750 but in order to spare our readers the agony of clicking back and forth between articles, we just post it again here. It just makes everybody's life easier this way.