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Against the stock 5750, XFX's HD 5750 XXX is a clear improvement… by one frame per second in pretty much every game. For a £5 premium over the average 5750, it's hardly a stretch for the wallet, but difficult to justify.
However, if you want to play games at medium to high resolutions with anti-aliasing and anisotropic filtering cranked up to the nines, you're shopping on the wrong shelf. And don't make the mistake of assuming that because this is a DX11-ready card, you'll see the benefits in gaming. Tessellation, the headline gaming-visuals feature, is pretty demanding, and a single 5750 just won't cut it at any kind of tasty framerate.
Its performance makes it more suited to media centre systems, and the single-slot design means it's perfect for a dinky chassis. The only problem that leaves us with is the lack of an HDMI port, which is a dog-gone necessity for media-centre systems.
Which leaves us… where? Sort of halfway to something, but that conundrum is solved by the addition of a second identical card. In CrossFireX, you see major performance gains with these cards, and excellent DX11-supporting midrange performance at less than £200 shouldn't be sniffed at.
However, there's a clear winner in the sub-£100 3D card market at the moment, and it's Nvidia's GTS 450. It outperforms ATI's competing crop of 5750 cards in most gaming tests, and when you pop a couple in your system for SLI dual-card kicks, they outperform their sub £200 price-tag like a pair of glue-fuelled X-Factor hopefuls. Until these HD 5750s see a considerable price-drop, the GTS 450 is where you should wave your wallet.
We liked
Elegant, quiet, and happiest at lower resolutions, it's a decent budget gaming card for small systems. The single-slot design is a welcome reduction in real-estate from the stock twin-slotter 5850s, and that smaller cooler doesn't bother the GPU in the slightest.
We disliked
The lack of an HDMI port doesn't completely ruin it for media-centre systems, but it certainly doesn't help matters. We'd prefer to see an HDMI and a single DVI, rather than dual DVIs. In terms of gaming performance, there's little to write home about over the stock 5750.
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