With both the ATI Radeon HD 4870/4890 and NVIDIA's Geforce GTX 260 videocards becoming increasingly difficult to find on store shelves, ATI's Radeon HD 5770 has certainly been a welcome respite.

The ASUS EAH5770 CuCore/2DI/1GD5/A videocard picks up right where ATI left off with the Radeon HD 4800-series, sometimes a little more closely than you might expect. You see, while it's based on a different generation of GPU technology the Radeon HD 5770 performs very similarly to that of the Radeon HD 4870 videocard.

In the majority of PCSTATS benchmarks the ASUS EAH5770 CuCore/2DI/1GD5/A videocard performed roughly at par to Radeon HD 4870-class cards and competing Geforce GTX 260's. There were a few videocard benchmarks that put NVIDIA's graphics cards at an advantage, but others like Call of Juarez were clear wins for the ASUS EAH5770 CuCore videocard.

While ATI's Radeon HD 5770 GPU might not bring huge increases in performance to the ~$200 VGA market, it does offer up DirectX 11 support. DirectX 11 has already popped up in a few game titles so far, like Stalker: Call of Pripyat, now a PCSTATS benchmark as you may have noticed. Advanced DirectX 11 features like hardware tesselation will be showing up in lot of games in late 2010 and 2011, so if you can afford it we recommend sticking with DX11 GPUs over the more economical DX10.1 GPUs. In the long run you'll be better off for it.

Thanks to a die-shrink to a 40nm production process, the ASUS EAH5770 CuCore/2DI/1GD5/A videocard enjoys lower power draw figures - if you care about such things. It comes with a beefy wad of copper and a relatively quiet heatsink fan. ASUS have packed all this into a dual-slot wide videocard, and of course it does require an extra PCI Express power connector. The HDMI/VGA/DVI outputs are a nice touch, and make it very easy to output HD video at 1080p to a nearby HDTV.

ASUS' EAH5770 CuCore/2DI/1GD5/A videocard retails for about $180 USD ($190 USD, £135 GBP), and as you saw earlier PCSTATS' overclocking results were good, if a little modest. PCSTATS was able to overclock the EAH5770 CuCore/2DI/1GD5/A from stock 850/1200MHz to 910/1325MHz - a nice boost in free performance anyway you look at it. Bottom line, the Radeon HD 5770's DirectX 11 support makes it an easy choice for those sussing out new graphics cards right now. In the meantime NVIDIA needs to hurry up and develop some midrange offerings before we completely forget what the heck a "Geforce" is!

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