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Sapphire Radeon HD 5670 512MB / 1GB Video Card Review

Radeon HD 5670 Testing and Benchmarking!

Today is a big day in the world of graphics cards as you can purchase an ATI Radeon HD 5000 series graphics card with full DirectX 11 support for under $100! AMD has announced a trifecta of new graphics cards this morning that expand AMD's already impressive lineup of their latest generation graphics cards.  The cards being announced today are the Radeon HD 5670, Radeon HD 5500 and the Radeon HD 5450. These cards come nearly three months after AMD released the ATI Radeon HD 5700 series of graphics cards in October. AMD gave birth to the Radeon HD 5000 series on September 23rd, 2009 when AMD released their 'Evergreen' series of Radeon 5800 graphics card with the Radeon HD 5870 for their high-end offering at $379.99. Exactly one week later they released the Radeon HD 5850, which featured two fewer SIMD engines and lower clock speeds, but came at a lower price point of just $279.99.  The ATI Radeon HD 5700 series of graphics cards is code named 'Juniper' and features a core that was basically half of what a Radeon HD 5800 series card has. The new Radeon HD 5600 series begins with the Radeon HD 5670 and like you might have guessed it features half of a 'Juniper' Core (see image) and is code named 'Redwood' for those that like to keep up on code names. The Radeon HD 5500 and 5400 series were announced today as well, but are not yet available in the market. Once they come out they will complete AMD's top-to-bottom line-up of DirectX 11 class cards. We were told that these entry level budget graphics cards will be in the $49-$80 price range. Let's talk more about the Radeon HD 5670, which is the card that we are looking at today.

The Radeon HD 5670 GPU has all of the same features that the other Radeon HD 5000 series cards do, so you will be able to run ATI Eyefinity monitor setups, DirectX 11 game titles and work faster with DirectCompute on Windows 7. The Radeon HD 5670 is also a single slot graphics card that has a total board power draw of just 14W at idle and 61W under load, which is impressive for a card that has 400 stream processors that operate at a clock frequency of 775MHz. That is good enough for the Radeon HD 5670 to have a compute power rating of 620 GigaFLOPs!

Since the AMD Radeon HD 5600 series architecture is really the same as what is on the 5700/5800 series we won't go into the boring details, but you can take a look at the block diagram above to give you an idea of what this new core looks like. AMD basically just took the die used in the Radeon HD 5700 series and cut it in half. To be more specific, the Radeon HD 5670 series offers up 5 SIMD engines, with up to 400 total Stream Processing Units. This is exactly half of what the Radeon HD 5700 series offers as those cards have up to 10 SIMD engines and a total of up to 800 Stream Processing Units. Since the Radeon HD 5670 is literally half of a Radeon HD 5700 and just a quarter of the Radeon HD 5800 series core, all the other specifications are also reduced by that amount. For a $99 card it should perform fairly well, but obviously nowhere near the performance of a Radeon HD 5750.

The specifications of the Radeon HD 5670 video card are fairly impressive as you can see from the chart above. The Radeon HD 5670 will be available in 512MB GDDR5 configurations for around $99 and 1GB GDDR5 configurations for $130. This puts the card just slightly less expensive than the Radeon HD 5750 when comparing it to the Radeon HD 5670 1GB and in the ball park of a GeForce GT 240 card that is factory overclocked. 

Legit Reviews was lucky and got our hands on a reference ATI Radeon HD 5670 512MB GDDR5 graphics card and a retail Sapphire Radeon HD 5670 1GB GDDR graphics card that we have been able to benchmark and run on a series of games and software applications to see how they do against each other.  It will be interesting to see how big of a role the frame buffer plays on these budget friendly graphics cards.

Next Page - ATI Radeon HD 5670 512MB

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