Sapphire Radeon HD 5570 1GB CrossFire Video Card Review

Legit Video Card Reviews

Manufacturer:	Sapphire
Product:	Radeon HD 5570
Date:	Tue, Feb 09, 2010 - 12:00 AM
Written By:	Nathan Kirsch -
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Radeon HD 5570 - $79 for 520 GFlops

Sapphire Radeon HD 5570 Video
Card Front

It has only been five days since ATI released the ATI Radeon HD 5450 video card, but they are back at it today with the announcement of the Radeon HD 5570 video card. This card was designed to be an energy efficient, low-profile, DirectX 11 card for small form factor PCs. It also happens to pack a pretty mean punch as it has a Compute Performance rating of 520 GFLOPS for a price tag of just $79. The Radeon HD 5450 that was released last week costs a mere $49, but is rated at only 104 GFLOPS. The bottom line here is that the Radeon HD 5570 has four times the compute performance for an extra $30 (a 61% price increase). Those that are looking to build a Home Theater PC (HTPC) or Small Form Factor (SFF) that want some muscle now have a choice between these two budget friendly low-profile graphics cards.

As previously mentioned, the ATI Radeon HD 5570 video card will be priced between $79-85, which makes it $30 more than the Radeon HD 5450 and $20 less than the Radeon HD 5670. The Radeon HD 5750 consumes 9.7 Watts of power at idle and 38 Watts under a typical work load. These are great sounding numbers, but are higher than the 6.5 Watts of power at idle and 19.1 Watts at full load that we saw on the Radeon HD 5450. While the Radeon HD 5450 was passive cooled from day one, all of the Radeon HD 5570 video cards are active cooled. Even though it is active cooled, it does feature a low-profile design which means it will fit in numerous small form factor (SFF) or mini-ITX chassis that are popular for HTPC builds. It is also a real single-slot card and the heat sink won't block any other slots on your motherboard. Just like all the other Radeon HD 5000 series cards the 5570 supports Dolby TrueHD and DTS-HD Master Audio for a great audio experience.

The Radeon HD 5570 has a core clock frequency of 650MHz with a memory clock frequency of 900MHz. This is good enough for a memory bandwidth of up to 28.8 GB/s and a compute performance rating of 520 GFLOPS thanks to the 400 stream processors.

The AMD Radeon HD 5500 series architecture is nearly exactly the same as what you have in the Radeon HD 5670 series, so you can take a look at the block diagram above to give you an idea of what this new core looks like. It is our understanding that the Radeon HD 5570 uses GDDR3 memory while the Radeon HD 5670 uses much faster GDDR5 memory. This is why both the Radeon HD 5570 and Radeon HD 5670 have 627 million transistors as the core is identical. All ATI Radeon HD 5000 series cards are built on the 40nm process by TSMC. Now that we have a good understanding of what the specs are, let's take a look at the card itself.

Next Page - ATI Radeon HD 5570 HDMI

Review Index

Page 1 - Radeon HD 5570 - $79 for 520 GFlops
Page 2 - ATI Radeon HD 5570 HDMI
Page 3 - Sapphire Radeon HD 5570 1GB
Page 4 - Retail Box and Bundle
Page 5 - Radeon HD 5570 Test Settings
Page 6 - Batman: Arkham Asylum
Page 7 - Resident Evil 5
Page 8 - Tom Clancy's H.A.W.X.
Page 9 - 3DMark Vantage
Page 10 - FurMark 1.7.0
Page 11 - Unigine 'Heaven' DX11
Page 12 - Temperature Testing
Page 13 - Power Consumption
Page 14 - Radeon HD 5570 Overclocking
Page 15 - Final Thoughts and Conclusions

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