INTRODUCTION: The first member of the family has evergreen hit the market in September (2009). AMD has since then not said much about what would follow. AMD has decided to remove the paper from 5670 last week at the CES 2010 Release Event. The 5600 series chip is called Redwood and currently only includes the Radeon HD 5650 and 5670 chips. The 5600 series is clearly targeted at the middle market segment, as in the release of AMD’s strategy to item. AMD has release two versions of the HD 5670 card, one with 1GB GDDR5 and another with 512MB GDDR5. This test is the second of which.



The 5600 series adopts the technologies of its big brothers like ATI Stream and ATI Eyefinity. Here are the very terms of their new AMD are “; ATI Stream “; Technology: ATI Stream technology is a set of advanced hardware and software behind AMD graphics processors (GPU), works in coordination with the central processing system (CPU ) accelerated to enabled applications over traditional graphics and video processing.

This enables balanced platforms to run computationally-intensive tasks more efficiently, providing a better application experience to the end user. The 5600 series also has full support for Microsoft DirectX 11 API. I guess most people buying a graphics card in the middle range segment don’t really know what the big deal is but anyone interested in the GPU industry knows that if you want to see the latest innovations in gaming you want to be on the latest DirectX train.

The standard specifications are now reviewed a generic AMD ATI Radeon HD 5670 512MB GDDR5 is. It is a pre production unit which AMD sends out to selected publications before other outfitters’ versions hit the store shelves. Actually, I’m a bit late with my post, but hey, what\#39;s the hurry anyway? Here are the specs for the 5670 512MB GDDR5: AMD ATI Radeon HD 5670 512MB GDDR5 GPU Redwood (Radeon HD 5670) Transistor 627 ms Speed 775 MHz GPU, 400 stream processors, performance evaluation 620GFLOPS complete 20 units of texture texture rate 25. 2 GTexels/s ROPs 16 Pixel fill rate 6. Of this technology 2 / s benefit Z / stencil 24. 8 GSamples/s Type of memory GDDR5 Speed of memory 1000 MHZ Amount of memory 515MB Bandwidth of memory 64 GB/s Bus width 128-bit Consumption Normal (61W)/IDLE (14W)

IN DETAIL:

I’m not going to spend too much time rambling about what the card looks like since most outfitters will be mounting their own cooling solutions. Short, but the paper has a slot cooler that large and is expected, with a mid-range card.

The card is manufactured with a 40nm technology which is great since it will increase its energy efficiency and decrease the generated heat in relation to performance. A good thing for the fact that this card is very small and thin that fits in small cases, HTPC and projects for media PC. The length of the Radeon HD 5670 is 170mm. The card has no PCI Express power connector that should be considered as positive beliefs. It means that the card will never draw more power than what the PCI-Express bus can handle. The generic 5670 card has three connectors: a display port, a HDMI and a DVI connector. It supports the “ATI Eyefinity” technology which means you can use monitors on each connector simultaneously. Support for the HDMI port HDMI 1 s. 3a which means full support for Dolby True HD and DTS Audio Masters. Test system my normal system of tests for this review, here are the specs: # 39; test facilities of the Intel Core i7 920 Shadow Mega Fan Prolimatech Asus Rampage II genes ATI Radeon HD 5670 512MB GDDR5 Sound Card Integrated Memory 3GB G. Skill Trident x2 1600 MHz (6-7-6-18) Hard Drive Intel X25-M Postville G2 80GB Corsair HX850W power supply operating system software and operating system Windows 7 64bit dirver system controller 8. 69_RC3 (BETA) DirectX August 2009 Benchmarking software 3D Mark 06 3D Mark Vantage Furmark 1. 7th Heaven Unigyne Benchmark Games The Last Remnant Street Fighter IV, Resident Evil 5 Weak

Call of Prypiat DIRT 2 Far Cry 2 Crysis Warhead Other software CPU-Z 1. 49 GPU-Z 0. 7 OCCT 3. During my first test I have the graphics settings of the game with the highest quality. I set the filter settings to “medium” because of the fact that this card is not intended for people who “must” have the filter settings to max. In this case the results tell me that the performance of this card is a bit above what I had expected from a medium range card in the new AMD generation. By comparison, a 240 GT Nvidia GDDR5 cards I’ve tried the same system was about 7000 points in 3DMark 2006 and my last test of a GT220 card (one card closer to the low-end segment) scored 6700 pts. The Radeon HD5670 card came in at 11700 points which exceeds the NVIDIA cards by quite a lot. Since I have lived with all DirectX11 compatible cards I reviewed, the yield decreases as the jump from DirectX 10 for DirectX 11. This is strange because “higher performance” is one of the major selling points with the new API from Microsoft. The Radeon HD 5670 really turns out to be even stronger than the first series of games that I predicted on the basis of the results in benchmark tests. I was actually somewhat surprised that this medium range card, at a price level below $100, could move these games with great fluidity. Games like The Last Remnant, Street Fighter IV and Devil May Cry 4 actually went really well, set at whatever level of graphic quality, resolution, or a filter. Even Resident Evil 5 ran OK

A strange thing about the results above is the case of the games STALKER: Clear Sky and STALKER: Call of Prypiat. The first uses DirectX 10 and DirectX 11 seconds. STALKER Clear Sky (DX10) offers a very limited gaming experience while STALKER: Call of Prypiat (DX11) has much better results. I mean these games are part of the same series. It raises questions like: is DirectX11 more efficient than DirectX10 after all? Or; do these two games have different 3D motors? I am afraid I cannot answer those questions for you, just thought that I’d bring it to your awareness. But there are clearly two parts to this game that can not handle this card, Far Cry 2 and Crysis Warhead. The performance of the Radeon HD 5670 in Far Cry 2 at a resolution of 1680×1050 (without filters) at 41. 04 FPS is just not good enough and far from the results that I achieved with the Sapphire HD 5750 (61. 57 FPS). However, the Radeon HD 5670 shows a remarkable performance for demanding games. If we can live with not always running the games in the highest resolutions with filters enabled, then you will not be disappointed. HD video to analyze the performance of the Radeon HD 5670, HD video playback, when I put the average CPU utilization (%) measured over a period of 5 minutes while playing HD content. I did the measurements in two resolutions: 720p.

The excellent results are really thanks to the ATI Steam technology. It nice to see how powerful a card with as little. It makes the card ideal for a HTPC. Overclocking, COOL AND NUTRITION overclocking is always exciting (at least for me), but I was not too enthusiastic about this card because all I had to work with ATI Catalyst application is. I did however reach a decent 9% increase of the GPU (775 MHz) and a 9. 5% increase in the frequency of the original memory. This was the max numbers I could set in the ATI Catalyst application which leaves some room for other outfitters to unlock a greater overclocking. The cooling system of the board does its job. We must consider that is just a generic sample of the card so none of the outfitters fancy cooling solutions are present. The temperatures in the table below are shown at full load is high, but really are, what we normally see with a new card AMD ATI reference model. We will just see what the different outfitters can come up with in terms of cooling solutions for the 5670 chip and what they can do with the temperatures. The fan is automatically controlled and its speed by 28% if the card is in idle mode. Below 40% the fan is imperceptible but above 50% it is perfectly audible without ever getting as annoying as fans on high end cards. The use of the new 40-nm manufacturing technology, gives this card an efficiency better than the previous generation of graphics cards. In the real world this means an improvement of the performance at the same power consumption levels. Or the opposite: lower energy consumption at the same level of performance. According to AMD ATI, the idle mode consumption should be 14W whereas the typical consumption in operation is at 61W. I measured the total power consumption of my system in idle mode and overclock, which is shown in the table below. I cannot tell you if AMD ATI’s number are correct or not. RESULTS The results for overclocking you tell us a slight performance increase. For instance the gain in Crysis Warhead was around 1. 5 FPS in Far Cry 2 l increase was about 3 FPS. In reality this doesn’t mean much. CONCLUSION OK, this card is clearly not a high-end gaming card, but the big question is whether it is strong enough for us players is useful to you? I would say absolutely yes! If you accept, without FPS filters to be satisfied with this card. Hard core gamers will however have to go for the next price level. What’s great with this card is that AMD has managed, in all new technologies that we saw in the 5800 series, such as current ATI and ATI DirectX11 Eyefinity squeeze. That fact combined with the fact that this card is quite small makes it ideal for anyone looking for a graphics card for HTPC project.

Tagged with: • • • • • • • • • • •

Filed under: General • HD 5670 • Review • Video

Like this post? Subscribe to my RSS feed and get loads more!