Introduction

AMD's new Radeon HD 5000 Series has been a great hit with NVIDIA having nothing to counter it. The new cards offer DirectX 11 support, AMD EyeFinity, improved HDMI audio features and considerably reduced power consumption. The Radeon HD 5770 has been released as reference design in mid October 2009, over the last weeks we have been seeing more and more custom-design HD 5770 accelerators by many AIBs.

MSI's Radeon HD 5770 Hawk follows the design principles of their Lightning series which is designed to offer supreme cooling performance to reach maximum overclocks. MSI has redesigned AMD's reference PCB to fit their requirements for this series and also uses their Twin Frozr II cooler which has been introduced with the MSI Lightning Series. Clock speeds have also received a small bump and are not at 875 / 1200. Pricewise all these changes add quite some premium, MSI expects card retail at about $190.

Packaging

MSI chose the F117 Nighthawk as cover image for their packaging, looks very impressive. The back has further info in multiple languages.

Contents

You will receive:

• Graphics card
• Driver CD + Quick Install Guide
• DVI to VGA Adapter
• Voltage measurement adapter

The Card

As mentioned before, MSI has modified AMD's reference PCB to fit their own needs. AMD's reference PCB number 109-C01337-00C (who picked the number?) can still be found on the top edge of the card, and right next to it you can find MSI's version number V214 Ver. 2.0. Usually when AIBs modify AMD's reference PCB they remove AMD's version number to make it clear that this is not an AMD reference design.


Just like the AMD reference design, the cooler occupies two slots. MSI has chosen to use a cooler that does not use the full height of the slot which will help with air circulation in crowded cases.


The card has one DVI port, one DisplayPort and one HDMI port. For a lower-end card like this I would have preferred to see an analog VGA or DVI+Adapter output instead of the DisplayPort.
For HDMI Audio, most NVIDIA cards require you to feed an external audio source, for example from your motherboard's on-board audio, to the card via SPDIF cable. AMD on the other hand has integrated a sound device inside their GPUs which is the easier solution for most users. Also AMD's integrated sound device has been upgraded to support HDMI 1.3a which includes Dolby TrueHD, DTS-HD, AC-3, DTS and up to 7.1 channel audio with 192 kHz / 24-bit.
The blue thingies you see on the picture above are some plastic protectors that MSI has added to cover the outputs, the CrossFire port and the PCI-E slot connector. Certainly a nice touch but not sure if they are worth it.


MSI has included a single CrossFire connector on their card (but no CF bridge in the package). This is not a limitation, CrossFire works the same with a single bridge or two of them.


Here are the front and the back of the card, high-res versions are also available (front, back). If you choose to use these images for voltmods etc, please include a link back to this site or let us post your article.