When you think about graphics card vendors, XFX is a brand name every end user holds to a high regard, based on aggressive pricing and stellar support through their Double-Lifetime warranty program. Because of their sales model, XFX had become the one of the largest NVIDIA AIB (Add-In Board) partners, and everyone rejoiced when XFX decided to become an ATI AIB partner over a year ago. Back in March, XFX announced they would not be an AIB partner on NVIDIA’s Fermi architecture which created quite a storm of press attention, especially once they started releasing information of their 4GB Radeon HD 5970 Petunia based graphics card.

With XFX focusing only on ATI’s 5xxx series, the mid-range market (which is the majority of gamers) became incredibly competitive, as well as the high end. Looking at any eTailer, such as Newegg or the like, throughout the performance spectrum XFX cards are at least tied for being the lowest price of any given model, making them attractive to say the least. What more could you want? The XFX Radeon HD 5xxx video card series is cheaper than the competition and has spectacular support as well.

When I headed over to XFXForce.com, I saw that XFX offers a staggering eleven different Radeon HD 5770 models all with 1GB of GDDR5 memory. Looking closer at the specs for each card, three models were factory overclocked, and one reference clcok is only available in Korea. That makes a total seven different reference clock HD 5770’s with varying heat sinks and the card we have today is not even on that list!

Today we have the XFX Radeon HD 5770 1GB model ZNFR. This is another reference spec and design card, and with 1360 GFLOPS of computing power it still has plenty of power under the hood- matching the Radeon HD 4890 of yesterday plus the DirectX 11 tessellation part. Below is a specs comparison of all the mid-range DX11 cards available. I would include NVIDIA DX11 cards, but there are none that fall into the sub-$250 range or close to it. Before we dive right into the specs, let’s take a look at the quick feature set of this card.

XFX HD-577A-ZNFR GPU Features:

• 1 GB GDDR5 memory
• ATI Eyefinity technology with support for up to 3 displays
• ATI Stream technology
• Designed for DirectCompute 11 and OpenCL
• Accelerated Video Transcoding (AVT)
• Compliant with DirectX 11 and earlier revisions
• Supports OpenGL 3.1
• Dual-mode ATI CrossfireX technology support for highly scalable performance
• ATI Avivo HD video and display technology
• Dynamic power management with ATI PowerPlay technology
• DualLink-DVI, DualLink-DVI, DisplayPort, HDMI video out connectors
• PCI Express 2.1 support

Specifications