Legit Reviews

Being an United States based website, Legit Reviews does still manage to gets its hands on some hardware from other continents, in this case we are looking at a video card from AXLE 3D in Hong Kong.  AXLE has distributors all across the globe from Malaysia to Germany to Indonesia and many other countries but is really trying to make a name for itself in North America. 

The video card we received direct from Hong Kong is the AXLE Radeon HD 5670 1GB. The Radeon HD 5670 is considered to be on the low end of the mid-range or budget market and is available between $80-$120. Not everyone has the same idea of "budget", but we classify the $80-$170 category as the budget/mid-range sector.

The AXLE Radeon HD 5670 1GB we have here is a reference design model with a custom Arctic Cooling (or "ARCTIC" now) heatsink assembly identical to the one found on the AXLE GeForce GT 240 512MB we reviewed late last year. Searching various retailers found that there are only a handful of HD 5670's that have a overclock from the factory, and only in the realm of 10-15MHz on the core or memory, not on both. Well lets take a look at the specifications of the reference models of budget DirectX 11 video cards and really get into things shall we:

Looking at the chart we see that the HD 5570 could really be called the 5650 as it is based on the same die with the same amount of shader units, just having slightly less compute power and low frequencies. When we look over at the HD 5770 we see that is practically just double the HD 5670, double the shader units, double the compute power, at nearly twice the cost.