ATI Re-Branding Radeon HD 5700 Series To Radeon HD 6700 Series

Re-branding of GPUs is often a confusing situation for consumers. Many times shopped see a higher series number and think the are getting a better GPU when in fact in many cases they are getting the exact same model with a new flashier name. In some rare cases you might even be getting a worse GPU by looking at series models alone. That is why I always suggest you do your research and verify what you are buying.

This week ATI implemented the companies plans to re-brand the Radeon HD 5700 series to the a newly created HD 6700 series, by listing the Radeon HD 6770 and HD 6750 on its website. For now, the new cards are listed as available only to OEMs, however that won't stop consumers from being a little confused.

So to alleviate some of that confusion let me first say, as far as specifications go, there are no changes between the 5700 and 6700 series with the two exceptions of OpenGL 4.1 support and HDMI 1.4a support. Visually speaking you can see a different-looking cooler shroud on the reference-design graphics cards. Other than that, they're the same exact cards internally.

The HD 6770 is based on the 40 nm Juniper silicon, with 800 VLIW5 stream processors, and 1 GB of GDDR5 memory over a 128-bit wide memory interface. The HD 6750 on the other hand has 720 stream processors. There's no information at present on when (or if) AMD plans to release this to the consumer market.

If you really want to check for yourself here are the links that represent both incarnations of each card:

• ATI Radeon HD 5750 | AMD Radeon HD 6750 (For OEM Only)
• ATI Radeon HD 5770 Graphics | AMD Radeon HD 6770 (For OEM Only)