When putting together a gaming rig, unless you’re rolling in the dough you have to make compromises with every part of the build. If we didn’t everyone would be running around with systems like this, and ATI and NVidia wouldn’t be putting out budget cards like the 5770 from Diamond Multimedia that we are going to take a look at today. With a low price point and low power requirements this may be a perfect card for my portable LAN rig.

Diamond packed the HD 5770 in a box with a nice rendering from Dirt 2 on the front. Around back there is a nice picture of an Eyefinity setup running on three monitors. Outside of that picture there was nothing important on the back, other than some marketing fluff. The side of the box has all the need-to-know along with pictures (adapters included, all available connections, and a picture of a PCI Express slot). Inside there is another box with containing everything. The video card itself is inside a static bag and protected by foam on both the top and bottom. They also included the manual, driver disc, DVI to VGA adapter, and a crossfire bridge.

As I said before I am hoping the 5770 will be a perfect card in my LAN rig. Using a Shuttle SP45H7 as a base, the goal is to keep it small and easy to carry. Being this small does have a couple concerns; will the 5770 fit into the small frame of the SP45H7? Also, will the small 300 watt power supply power it? Installing the card was easier than I thought, the 8.6 inch card slipping in without any problem. In fact, as you can see in the pictures, I had more than enough extra room after everything was said and done. Plugging in power was fine: the 5770 only has one 6 pin plug, much better than most of the high end cards on the market. I skipped installing the drivers off the disc and went with the most up to date driver from ATI’s website. With everything installed and ready I couldn’t wait to take it out to a few LANs.

Performance

To test out the 5770 I wanted to take it out to a few lans and put it to the true test in game. Of course you can’t graph satisfaction with game performance, and because of that I also put the card through a few synthetic benchmarks to get an idea of where the card stands against other cards on the market.

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• READ MORE (Source): Diamond Multimedia HD5770