Diamond Radeon HD 5750 OC Video Card Review

Final Thoughts and Conclusion

The Diamond Radeon HD5750 OC is the fastest Radeon HD5750 out there (at the time of this writing). Although, in my opinion it does have its faults. Well, maybe not quite faults since the Diamond Radeon HD5750 did outperform the other 5750’s in almost all of the tests, so we will say concerns. Starting with concerns about the card itself, I was surprised to see that it didn’t throttle back as far as the other HD5000 series cards that I have tested. It did, however, still have a nice low power consumption compared to most of the other cards. I was also concerned about the temperature. The Sapphire Radeon HD5750 that I reviewed was a full 10 degrees Celsius cooler than the Diamond Radeon HD5750. I was expecting a little better performance than I got from it. Neither of those issues alone are a deal breaker for me, but a case is building.

Moving past the concerns I have about the card we get to the bundle. It was a little on the light side for my liking. Ignore for a moment, if you will, the front of the package with all the DiRT 2 labels. We have no power adapter in the bundle. Granted, many people looking to put in a card of this caliber probably have at least one PCIe 75 Watt connector in their computer, but I am sure not all will. Even the HD5870 I reviewed came with two adapters and that’s a $429.00 card which is most likely going into a very high-end computer that already has the required connectors. Now stop ignoring the front of the packaging like I asked you to. Adorned with a DiRT 2 rally car and the Colin McRae: DiRT 2 logo I was fully expecting to see a coupon with an activation code for the game. Unfortunately there wasn’t one; instead you receive a coupon for 35 free songs and 1 audiobook from emusic.com. That (free music coupon) isn’t bad at all, I’m just saying I was let down by not having a game whose logo is on the front of the box inside. Diamond was, however, running a promotion from November 15 2009 through January 15 2010 to get DiRT 2 if you registered certain cards in that time frame.

Setting those minor concerns aside the Diamond Radeon HD5750 is a solid performing card. It performed better than the other 5750’s on most of the tests we threw at it. It runs near silent when the fan is left on auto and is just as quiet as the other 5750’s when you manually set the fans to 100%.

Legit Bottom Line: The Diamond Radeon HD5750 is a solid performing card on its own. If you were to run two of them in Crossfire you can give a HD5870 a run for its money for around $100.00 less.