When I was introduced to PowerColor's HD 5750 Go Green at CES this year, I was quite sceptical. This whole "green" discussion has been transformed into a marketing scheme for companies to sell new stuff to consumers who are perfectly happy with what they had before. Let's see... the HD 5750 Go Green costs you $150, in terms of power consumption that's 1250 kWh at $0.12 per kWh (US average in Apr 2009). Assuming you had a HD 4850 until now, which has roughly the same 3D performance, but an idle power draw of 38 W vs. 14 W on the HD 5750 Go Green, you will save 24 Wh per hour of usage. In order to save 1250 kWh (to make up your cost) you'd need to have the PC sitting idle for ~52,000 hours, which is about 6 years 24/7. Even if you sold your HD 4850 on eBay, where the going rate is about $50, you'd still have 4 years to go. If you now think about the energy that went into powering the engineer PCs to design the product, the energy in the factory making the product, the oil used to ship the card from China to your doorstep, it becomes clear that the greenest thing to do is to not buy a new product and be happy with what you have for as long as it lasts. On the other hand, when you are building a new PC, you could realistically save 15 bucks a year with a card like this, certainly not a bad thing, as long as you are aware that you won't save $1000 or something.

But let's look at the product from a slightly different angle. The passive cooler, which emits zero noise makes this card the prime candidate for a media PC or silent work PC that can handle most casual gaming at resolutions up to 1680x1050 or 1920x1200 at lower details settings. The card comes at a reasonable price point when compared to other HD 5750 cards, even though it can not compete with NVIDIA's current bargain offers for the GTS 250. In case you are an overclocker and love to play with hardware to achieve nice benchmarking scores, then this is the HD 5750 to get. As far as I know it's the only HD 5750 card using Volterra's excellent voltage regulators that offer incredible software control and monitoring features - better than any other VRM solution out there. Strap a 120 mm fan onto the heatsink, bump the voltage and you'll soon be breaking some records (in that performance class).
Overall I have to applaud PowerColor who designed an excellent card that delivers leading power consumption values. It is amazing that they managed to reduce power consumption by over a third vs. the AMD reference design (which is already great), to achieve their goal of being able to run without PCIe power connector. PowerColor also managed to squeeze in these changes without any reduction in clock rates or performance, which is what we often see on so called "green" products. If you are in the market for a HD 5750 you should definitely look at PowerColor's HD 5750 Go! Green - it can easily compete with all the other HD 5750 cards out there.