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.