PowerColor HD 5770 PCS+

Introduction

Last year AMD released their new Radeon HD 5800 Series of graphics cards which quickly became a big success due to the numerous improvements made over previous generations. Over the course of the last months AMD has been adding more cards to their DirectX 11 lineup quickly, most recently the Radeon HD 5670.

AMD's Radeon HD 5770 has been out for several months as we are seeing the first customized designs now. PowerColor has customized the PCB designs to fit their needs and they also include a different thermal solution than the AMD reference design. On top of that the clock speeds have received a small bump from 850/1200 MHz to 875/1225 MHz (core/memory). While this is a fairly small increase, every little bit of extra performance helps. All these changes come at a price though, PowerColor expects a price of $180, which is about $25 more than the reference design.

UPDATE Jan 22, 2010:
PowerColor has provided us with an updated BIOS that should reduce the fan noise of the card considerably. They also informed us that the current price of the card at Newegg is $165 before MIR. You can get the updated BIOS here, or contact PowerColor support if you need additional assistance.

We have updated the pages Power Consumption, Fan Noise, Performance/Watt, Performance/$, Overclocking, Value & Conclusion to reflect properties of the new BIOS. When relevant, old text has been left in the review formatted strikethrough.

	Radeon HD 4770	GeForce GTS 250	Radeon HD 4850	Radeon HD 4870	Radeon HD 5770	PowerColor HD 5770 PCS+
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	1225 MHz
Price	$115	$110	$105	$155	$155	$180