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.

	Radeon HD 4770	GeForce GTS 250	Radeon HD 4850	Radeon HD 4870	Radeon HD 5770	MSI HD 5770 HAWK
Shader units	640	128	800	800	800	800
ROPs	16	16	16	16	16	16
GPU	RV740	G92	RV770	RV770	Juniper	Juniper
Transistors	826M	754M	956M	956M	1040M	1040M
Memory Size	512 MB	1024 MB	512 MB	512 MB	1024 MB	1024 MB
Memory Bus Width	128 bit	256 bit	256 bit	256 bit	128 bit	128 bit
Core Clock	750 MHz	738 MHz	625 MHz	750 MHz	850 MHz	875 MHz
Memory Clock	800 MHz	1100 MHz	993 MHz	900 MHz	1200 MHz	1200 MHz
Price	$115	$110	$105	$155	$155	$190