Powercolor HD5770 Vortex 1GB Review

The HD5770 is one of KitGuru's favourite cards in the ATi 5000 series. It offers very respectable gaming performance with extremely competitive pricing, especially now as they have dropped even further since the release of the nVidia GTX460. There has never been a better time to buy a HD5770.

The Powercolor version of the card is better in every conceivable way. It runs cooler, its quieter, it has extremely impressive overclocking capabilities and while we can't yet find it for sale in the UK, we have been told that the pricing is expected in the £145-£150 mark – putting it head to head against the Sapphire Vapor X 1GB.

The PowerColor card is supplied with a good core clock increase, 50mhz over reference speeds which makes the performance increases noticeable (900mhz). The memory also receives a very modest boost of 25mhz (effective 100mhz) to 3.9GHZ.

This however only paints half the picture.

As we found with the Sapphire board, the memory headroom is simply massive and we managed to get the 1GB of memory clocked to 1400mhz, giving an effective speed of 5.6ghz which is extremely impressive. The fact that the core also overclocked a further 50mhz without noise levels increasing means this will be an ideal board for discerning enthusiasts who hate irritating fan noise.

This leads me nicely into one of the products key talking points, the inventive cooler solution which is height adjustable. In a raised position we noticed slightly better airflow around the card, but in real world terms, the card has been so effectively configured that it didn't make much difference. What we do love however is the fact that the fan area is detachable to aid with cleaning of the heatsink. This is not a gimmick and is actually one of the most creative ideas ive seen this year and means the user can clean the card easily without having to detach the complete cooler unit.

This is the finest HD5770 we have tested and we love the proconfigured fan settings, it never becomes intrusive in a system build, remains much cooler than the reference solution and has a very low power draw.

KitGuru says: If you have £150 and want a new video card, then this gets the complete KitGuru stamp of approval.

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