MSI Radeon HD 5770 Hawk

MSI's Radeon HD 5770 HAWK leaves a good impression. Its TwinFrozr cooler gives you extremely low noise levels - much lower than the AMD reference design, and also does a good job at keeping the card cool. We saw good overclocking results on our sample, which didn't break any sweat at all when overclocked. MSI has also included a few goodies for the more extreme overclockers. Their bundled Afterburner software allows easy clock, fan and voltage control up to 1.35V. If you plan on going even further and doing a manual volt mod, you can easily monitor the GPU and memory voltage using the voltage measurement points that MSI has added to the PCB.


The only thing that concerns me is the high price of $190. The cheapest HD 5770 can be found online in the $160 range, but that doesn't include the fancy fan, or the overclock out of the box. MSI's overclock of 875 / 1200 vs. 850 / 1200 on the reference design could barely make a difference in our benchmarks. We see about 3% improvements to the normal card which is something that you will not notice in-game. It is my impression that AMD does not allow further overclocking by AIBs because all overclocked cards we have been seeing so far come with only a slight increase in clock speeds.
Overall the MSI HD 5770 Hawk is a solid card that also shows that MSI is willing to go the extra mile to deliver new features to overclockers.