When ATI announced the 5870 and 5850, with superbly high performance and HD audio bitstream support, we knew it was only a matter of time before they announced and released cheaper cards relying on the same technology with these ground breakingly high performers. Enter Radeon HD 5770 and 5750! Priced at $159 and $109 respectively, the two card are easy on the budget, while still maintaining their positions as high performers with a computing power of over 1 TFLOPS. The early reviews found 5770’s performance to be almost as high as ATI’s past generation star, the 4890.
Another upside of these two mainstream graphics adapters is, of course, HD audio bitstream support for transmitting untouched, HD quality Dolby Digital Plus and DTS HD MA audio to supporting home theater receivers. This translates to HTPC users losing the dedicated audio card in their system while upgrading their graphics adapter. I personally have been using a Sound Blaster X-Fi card with my system and have been waiting for Auzentech’s HD audio solution (and it’s availability where I live). ATI’s latest offerings look almost perfect to me. I’ll probably want to see like products from nVidia as well, as their drivers tend to agree with me more. If you’re system is generally problem-free with ATI’s drivers, I’d strongly suggest these two cards for HTPC systems…
Here are some reviews of the two cards:
Hot Hardware review
PC Perspective review
HardOCP review
TweakTown review
Techgage review
AnandTech review
Hexus review
via Engadget
