w33dg0d :
I have a 5770 personally myself and from previously upgrading from an nvidia 7xxx series i would not consider going back.
The 450 is a nice card i do agree but the selling point of a card should not be that it is overclockable but that how it performs, this is where the 5770 is better than the 450 ~ performance.
Its all down to personal preferance, but the selling point of a card should never be how well it can be overclocked after purchase.
Well, yes and no.
There are some cards out there such as the GTX 470 which, with some tweaking, can show similar performance to its big brother the GTX 480. Is buying a card with its overclockability in mind a valid criteria? Yes indeed it is! If it's possible to get equal bang for less buck, then only the non-value conscious are going to scorn that.
In addition, one needs to take into account the fact that the 450 is a crippled card. Nvidia released it WAY BELOW what it's capable of. The reason I say this is having done some fair research online I discovered that everyone could basically pull their card up to a very respectable performance level right out of the box with an OC on air. Basically, if all cards manufactured can be taken up to a high OC that is universally stable, then that feels more like it's "true" stock frequencies.
All 450 owners can bring their cards up from 783 Mhz to at least 900 Mhz, from there onwards it's the normal procedure for OCing a card.
Now I'm not as well versed with regards to the 5770, but I do know that from benchmarks the 450 performs about the same as a 5770. Maybe it takes a frame or two here, maybe it gives them here or there.
Bottom line, don't get me wrong. I'm not saying the 450 is BETTER than the 5770, I'm just saying they're roughly equal. People can rant about how the 5770 beat the 450 by 2 FPS in game X at Y settings, but really? 2 FPS? Would that actually be noticeable in a real world context? Really?