Has the HD 6850 aged well now it has reached the budget graphics card market?

A plucky little GPU that puts up a good fight at the lower end of the market

A pokey mid-range card, with good CrossFire performance

Factory-overclocked 3D cards, such as the XFX Radeon HD 5750 XXX, are a pretty common next step for most manufacturers when a GPU starts maturing, and it's no surprise. When your fabs have cranked out squillions of chips, the price-war between stock cards has stabilised and a new generation of cards is peeping over the horizon, there's the natural drive to differentiate and offer a little more performance to keep the GPU attractive.

As the very cheapest of the HD 5770s we've tested, XFX's offering grabs our interest. Shop around, and you can have one of these for as little as £116 – that's a whole £35 cheaper than Sapphire's offering, with its four-screen EyeFinity capability.

You'd hope a quality graphics card supplier would do a good job with an 850w PSU offering 80Plus silver certification and Nvidia SLI support.

Is this the greatest graphics card ever concieved?

XFX push the mid-range GeForce card to its limits

The board itself is a standard NFORCE 680i job. That means it's stable and overclocks well, but runs hot compared to the latest Intel boards at similar speed. It does have an LED read-out for troubleshooting, though, which few of the P35 boards have.

We were never fooled. In fact we rarely are when it comes to matters of product names. Some even say that PCF technical editor Al Bickham views the world in terms of benchmarks, and that the only time he uses graphics card boxes is to decorate his lair

You have to hand it to XFX, at least they're trying to humanise their cards with a 'proper' name. We're not sure whether the Alpha Dog brand will catch on, mind, but it does add something to differentiate one high powered 8800GT from, yet another one.