AMD has successfully executed the next step in their Radeon HD 5000 Series launch strategy. The HD 5770 offers a healthy performance boost of over the 25% compared to the HD 4770 with performance being equivalent to the Radeon HD 4870. The new card includes all the new features like DirectX 11, ATI Eyefinity, improved HDMI Audio and reduced power consumption.
Resolution wise the sweet spot for the HD 5770 seems to be 1680x1050 or 1920x1200 if you are willing to sacrifice highest settings on some games. Thanks to AMD's new power saving techniques the card idles at only 17 Watts and reaches 112 W maximum power draw. This gives it a leading spot in performance per Watt together with the other HD 5800 Series cards. Thanks to the great GDDR5 memory chips from Hynix we were able to reach 6 GHz effective memory speed with overclocking, which is a 25% increase over the default clock speeds.
The only real complaint I have about this card is that its fan seems to be noisier than necessary, especially when considering the performance class it is in. And then there is the price. At AMD's MSRP of $159 the card is just too expensive when compared to the HD 4870, which can be had for $135 right now. It is understandable that a price premium is justified for the new features, but $25 feels like a bit much for the sub-$150 performance segment. I expect that HD 5770 prices will drop quite soon. When asked about availability AMD responded that they will have more than 10,000 cards available in retail at launch. Let's hope that this is enough to satisfy the big demand.