I orginally thought it was drivers too, but given it was rock solid stable for 3 hours and a simple shutdown blew it up again, got me thinking it was the MB or video card hw. I put the 5770 in a different machine and it would blow up there too. So that pretty much ruled out the MB and OS. New system is Win 7 64 Ultimate vs old system XP. I re-formatted twice in hopes of removing remenants of old drivers. That didnt work either. I have spent a week trying to get this working through various drivers and minimal BIOS changes. The interesting thing I noticed with the 9.11 drivers was the fan's nominal setting went from 35% to 50%. Additionally, Sapphire already has a new 5770 that has a larger fan and the specs are identical. Makes me wonder why.

For now I am RMAing the card for a new one for the specific reason Tom's Hardware stated ...
"Indeed, while the Radeon HD 5770 doesn't run away with any performance crowns in this category, it does look good from a longevity/value standpoint" BOB should look great on the 5770, whenever it comes out.

If the new card still sucks,then I guess will switch to the GTX260. For now the only thing that may suffer is IL2 in Open GL.

I use MSI Afterburner to control my GPU fan speed since it runs at 30 percent default. That's one of the reasons it gets so hot. It works with most cards, not just MSI. Maybe that is the problem. Heat.

http://www.bjorn3d.com/read.php?cID=1696

http://event.msi.com/vga/afterburner/