In a recent article we conjectured on what would make a good Radeon HD 5770 GPU. Cut down from the Radeon HD 5870/50 cards to hit an etail price point of below $200, we expect a bit less of everything.

Now, the word on the street is that the $150 Radeon HD 5750 is due to make an appearance very soon. Those pesky critters over at mymypc.com have taken pictures and posted a few benchmarks on what is purportedly the mid-range 5-series card.

Assuming that the report is correct, the 'Juniper' HD 5750 will feature 1,120 stream processors operating at 700MHz and a 128-bit memory interface allied to GDDR5 memory running at an effective 4,600MHz. This amounts to a theoretical 1.57TFLOPS of compute performance and 73.6GB/s bandwidth.

The memory-bandwidth number seem a little low for a card that should etail for around £115 in the UK, especially in view of the attractive price on current Radeon HD 4870 and 4890 cards.

We'd have hoped that the HD 5750 would ship with a single-slot-taking reference cooler, intimating low power-draw. That doesn't appear to be the case, although AMD's AIBs may well design their own solutions at a later date.

Should the vital statistics and price turn out to be true, AMD will have its work cut out in convincing punters that an upgrade from a mid-range Radeon 4-series or GeForce 9-series card is in order.

The simple fact of the matter is that AMD is in a position to charge a premium for shiny, new hardware because NVIDIA won't have a comparable response until next year.

What do you think? Impressed by this 'HD 5750'?