Right on the heels of selling my 1070 ES I picked up this poor guy:
Radeon HD 5770 ES from around May 25, 2009. The card itself has suffered some extreme damages; missing caps, busted vreg, gouged PCB, torn up traces, bent crossfire finger. It's a mess, and well above my skill level to repair. The most interesting (and still functional) part if this card is the cooler. Below is a comparison to the similar in style but completely different Radeon HD 4770 reference cooler.
The heatsink design of this sample is the same as the final revision 5770; a finstack on top of a thin vapor chamber. The fan housing is physically the same as the 4770 reference, however the fan, air channel, and shroud have all been changed. This card gives a glimpse into the design work behind even a low-end product. While it'll probably never function again as a GPU I'll be keeping this one in the
collection.
Edit: Upon reassembly of both cards I noticed that the 4770 shown is actually
newer than the 5770 ES with a PCB date of 0926 and ASIC date of 0933, 6 weeks and 11 weeks newer respectively. The 5770 ES was labeled by June 29, 2009 (week 27) almost a month and a half before the 4770's ASIC would be fused. Interesting trivia.
And lucky once more to have a working 7900 GX2. I have the faulty Quadro variant, missing a load of surface mount caps and such. Which actually brings up a nice question, would you mind helping me in a while if I sent pictures of what was missing and you could measure the values of what I needed?
