Pretty much any Radeon HD 5770 out there is in fact already a very nice mainstream graphics card. You get decent performance, the DX11 feature set, extra's in the form of Eyefinity and UVD2. So from ground up the basic product is already really nice.

Once you get the R5770 HAWK edition from MSI in your hands, you get pretty much the same thing in terms of baseline performance. It's such a shame that ATI does not allow out of the box overclocks, that really hurts the HAWK series a little as these puppies are just made for a faster experience. On average we get roughly 100 MHz more out of a regular overclock. In fact we clocked it 200 MHz faster than the reference product -- stable. The design clearly works, the optimized PCB, quality components, additional power phases armed with a combination of Afterburner's voltage regulation makes the R5770 HAWK stand out really well. Armed with roughly 1.3 volts on the GPU we ended at around 1050 MHz on the core. And that to means that running 1000 MHz one any R5770 HAWK retail samples out there should be realistic to achieve.

Memory wise things are  looking pretty nice as well, we got 1415 MHz out of the memory, 100% stable, with quad data rate memory that is an effective clock frequency of 5660 MHz. You'll agree with me that for a mainstream product that's really nothing to be ashamed about.

Then the cooler, during our overclock session we did not alter fan RPM or anything, we left PWM control fully automated, and even at such a high overclocks the temperatures remains under control, and the cooler in fact silent. So there's a lot to say about the HAWK series. These cards are fully optimized for you to ensure a nice tweaking session.

But if you are not an overclocker, what does this product get you then ? Well my answer here would be extra benefits. The performance might roughly the same as the reference model. The components used however will ensure a much longer lifespan and we feel that the cooler is just doing an awesome job as it is completely silent, Honestly I wouldn't even mind inserting this product into a HTPC as you just will not hear it. We like that very much.

Of course a completely overhauled graphics card will be more pricy, the MSI Radeon HD 5770 HAWK edition is therefore slightly more expensive, but not a whole lot. I was just checking prices on the regular cards and noticed that at the time of writing this article they are in the 170~180 USD range. The HAWK edition will be launched at 195 USD, and we feel that even if you would not overclock, the extra ~20 bucks is well invested.

So we don't give out this award often, especially in the mid-range segment, but it's definitely worthy of it .. our best hardware award. We can recommend the MSI Radeon HD 5770 HAWK edition very much.

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