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.

Packaging

PowerColor uses their established HD 5770 package, I find the + in the PCS+ label a bit hard to spot though. The back has further information about the product in multiple languages.

Contents

You will receive:

• Graphics card
• Driver CD + Quick Install Guide
• DiRT 2 coupon
• CrossFire bridge
• DVI to VGA adapter

The Card

PowerColor has chosen to design their own PCB, and use their own custom cooling solution.


Just like the reference design, the card occupies two slots in the system.


The card has two DVI ports, one HDMI port, and one DisplayPort. This is just one of many output configurations that are possible on the new cards, thanks to the overhauled display output logic. Basically the card can drive six TMDS signals that can be combined in any way (a dual-link DVI consumes two TMDS lines).

For HDMI Audio, NVIDIA requires 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.


Crossfire configurations are supported to improve performance even further.


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.