Sapphire's Radeon HD 5750 is a worthy addition to the new HD 5000 Series lineup. Even though it might not win any beauty contest against AMD's reference design HD 5770, which comes with a very stylish modern looking cooler, it can score high on all other criteria. Performance is decent, sitting right between the HD 4850 and HD 4870. Due to its more power efficient design it can take leading spots in idle power consumption and performance per Watt. If you spend most of your day at the desktop idle, working office apps or surfing the Web, the ~20W saved might be able to make quite a difference over time. It should also be noted that even though the cooler looks neither sexy nor powerful it offers excellent cooling performance, which allows Sapphire to run at very quiet fan speeds, offering a very enjoyable work and gaming experience with their new HD 5750.
Our sample showed some impressive overclocking capabilities. Both core and and memory could be overclocked by well over 20%. If you are willing to go this route, you could easily save some money and get performance similar to the HD 5770 or HD 4870.
When looking at pure performance per buck you will be disappointed however. AMD's HD 4850 can be had at substantially lower price levels (-30%) than the HD 5750 and offers similar performance (-8%). I have to admit that the new features like DirectX 11, EyeFinity, native HDMI & DisplayPort warrant a price increase, but these features are not important for everyone. So the bottom line is: if you want the best bang for the buck right now, go with the HD 4850. If you want a longer term investment in future technologies, check out the HD 5750.