ATI Radeon HD 5670 Review
[Abstract]
Capturing the Mainstream MarketThings are looking good for ATI lately. Not only were they first to get DirectX 11 compatible graphics cards into the market, but NVIDIA's inability to release th...
[Content] PCDigitalMobileGame
Capturing the Mainstream Market
Things are looking good for ATI lately. Not only were they first to get DirectX 11 compatible graphics cards into the market, but NVIDIA's inability to release their own DirectX 11 solutions in the same time span also meant that ATI has had the entire DirectX 11 market to themselves for almost a full four months!
To rub salt into NVIDIA's wounds, in the past four months they have also reclaimed the title of fastest single GPU (the Cypress XT found on the Radeon HD 5870) and also the title of fastest single graphics card (Radeon HD 5970) from NVIDIA.
Not content with their dominant display of late, ATI is following up on its recent successes with a brand new graphics card for the more budget-minded, the Radeon HD 5670. The new Radeon HD 5670 cards will be powered by the Redwood XT GPU, which has 400 stream processing units, 20 texture mapping units and 8 raster operating units. Its core will run at 775MHz, with the memory at 4000MHz DDR. Memory bus width will be kept at 128 bits width (similar to the Radeon HD 5770 and Radeon HD 5750), and the new cards will come in either 512MB or 1GB flavors.
This is the reference ATI Radeon HD 5670 that we received from ATI. As you can see, it does not hide its budget and mainstream intentions for there's nothing fancy about it. |
Admittedly, when compared to the current 'base' model of the Evergreen series - the Radeon HD 5750 - which is running on the 720-stream processor Juniper LE GPU, the Redwood XT does look kind of lightweight. However, ATI has said that the Radeon HD 5670 will be considerably more affordable - under US$100 (S$138) to be exact - making it the first truly affordable DirectX 11 graphics card. And despite being an affordable part with not as much horsepower as its other Evergreen brothers, the Radeon HD 5670 still supports EyeFinity, which means it can power up to three displays simultaneously.
According to statistics from ATI, over 15 million gamers have Steam accounts and there are over 11 million World of Warcraft players. Of them, only a mere 10% have a display resolution of 1920 x 1200 or more, and around 66% are using a sub US$100 graphics card. As such, the budget to mainstream segment is a huge one, and this is the exact target audience ATI is aiming with the new Radeon HD 5670.
We are sure you are eager to find out how ATI's latest offering fares, but first here's a look at the specifications of the Radeon HD 5670 and how it stacks up against other competitive SKUs.
There's a slight glitch there as the GPU clock is supposed to read 775MHz. |
The Radeon HD 5670 & Competitive Comparison SKUs
| Model | ATI RadeonHD 5670 | NVIDIAGeForce GT 240 | ATIRadeon HD 4670 | ATIRadeon HD 4770 | NVIDIAGeForce 9800GT | NVIDIAGeForce 9600 GT | | CoreCode | Redwood XT | GT215 | RV730 | RV740 | G92 | G94 | | TransistorCount | 627 million | Unknown | 514million | 826million | 754 million | 505 million | | ManufacturingProcess | 40nm | 40nm | 55nm | 40nm | 65 / 55nm | 65nm | | CoreClock | 775MHz | 550MHz | 750MHz | 750MHz | 600MHz | 650MHz | | StreamProcessors | 400 | 96 | 320 | 640 | 112 | 64 | | StreamProcessor Clock | 775MHz | 1340MHz | 750MHz | 750MHz | 1800MHz | 1625MHz | | TextureMapping Units (TMU) or Texture Filtering (TF) units | 20 | 32 | 32 | 32 | 56 | 32 | | RasterOperator Units (ROP) | 8 | 16 | 8 | 16 | 16 | 16 | | MemoryClock | 4000MHz DDR | 1800MHz DDR(GDDR3)/ 3600MHz DDR (GDDR5) | 2000MHzDDR | 3200MHzDDR | 1800MHz DDR | 1800MHz DDR | | DDRMemory Bus | 128-bit | 128-bit | 128-bit | 128-bit | 256-bit | 256-bit | | PCIExpressInterface | PCIe x16 ver2.0 | PCIe x 16ver 2.0 | PCIex16 ver 2.0 | PCIex16 ver 2.0 | PCIe x 16ver 2.0 | PCIe x 16ver 2.0 | | PCIePowerConnectors | None | None | None | 1x 6-pin | 1 x 6-pin | 1 x 6-pin | | Multi-GPUTechnology | CrossFireX (vendor dependent) | None | CrossFireX | CrossFireX | SLI | SLI | | DVIOutputSupport | Yes | Yes | Yes | Yes | Yes | Yes | | HDCPOutputSupport | Yes | Yes | Yes | Yes | Yes | Yes | | StreetPrice | LaunchPrice:
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