ATI Radeon HD 5670 512MB

The picture above shows the reference Radeon HD 5670 editioncard. The card takes up just a single-slot and has no external power needed. This is nice for those that are looking to upgrade a PC that doesn't have any extra PSU headers for a 6-pin PCIe power cable.  The GPU heat sink is rather small, but the fan really isn't that loud so don't worry.  All of the hot air from the cooling fan gets recirculated inside the case, so keep this in mind if you have a chassis with limited airflow. One thing that stood out to us right away is that the Radeon HD 5670 512MB reference design graphics card does NOT have any CrossFire connectors. AMD said that the card will be available with and without the connectors for CrossFire as not including them will reduce costs. This is an interesting move, so if you are shopping for one of these make sure you get the one you really desire.

This ATI reference card features a 775MHz GPU clock with a 1000MHz memory clock, for an effective data rate of 4Gbps. At those clocks, the Radeon HD 5670 offers a peak texture fillrate of 15.5GTexel/s and 64GB/s of memory bandwidth. Not bad for a little $99 graphics card that has up to 620 GFLOPs of compute performance according to the AMD white papers. What power supply will you need to power the Radeon HD 5670? AMD recommends a 400 Watt or greater power supply for a single card. How long is the Radeon HD 5670? The Radeon HD 5670 measures six and 5/8" in length.

The back of the ATI Radeon HD 5680 video card lacks the metalplate found on some cards, but it doesn't appear to need the plate for cooling the memory IC's as the 5670 512MB GDDR5 card doesn't have any ICs or critical componentsto keep cool on the back.

The ATI Radeon HD 5670 graphics card has a single dual-link DVI-I output along with DisplayPort and HDMI outputs. We were told by ATI that the add-in board partners can change this configuration around and Legit Reviews has seen cards featuring a single dual-link DVI-I output along with VGA and HDMI outputs as well in recent weeks.

Compared to the Sapphire Radeon HD 5670 1GB GDDR5 video card on the left the reference design's PCB layout looks nearly identical with the exception of the CrossFire interconnects. Let's take a closer look at the Sapphire Radeon HD 5670 1GB and see what that video card offers you for an extra $30 over the reference design's budget $99 price tag.