Published in Reviews

Low profile Sapphire HD 5570 tested

by on09 February 2010

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After introducing the cheapest DirectX 11 card to the market, AMD expanded its offer with yet another HD 5000 series card dubbed the HD 5570. This card should fill the gap between the HD 5450 and HD 5670.

The reason for relatively good performance is 400 stream processors, 8 ROP units and 20 texture units. The same specs are featured on the faster HD 5670, but our today’s card runs at lower clocks. The HD 5570 runs at 650MHz for the GPU whereas the memory runs at 900MHz (1800MHz effectively). Furthermore, the card comes with DDR3 memory which is slower than the HD 5670’s GDDR5, and both cards feature 128-bit memory interface. Note that the currently cheapest DirectX 11 card on the market comes with a 64-bit interface.

Redwood and Cedar based AMD cards, which are currently the HD 5670, HD 5570 and HD 5450 don’t require additional power connectors. The HD 5570 will draw from 9.69W in idle to maximum 42.7W in 3D mode. The small core doesn’t heat up so AMD had no trouble in using a small fan.

Sapphire didn’t change much on the HD 5570. The card is low profile, which will be appealing to those who are looking into the possibility of building an HTPC and the HD 5450 doesn’t quite strike their chord. Sapphire’s I/O panel features a dual-link DVI, DisplayPort and VGA out. The card supports ATI Eyefinity, meaning that you can use three monitors, but such move will require using the DisplayPort as well.

There are many reasons why Sapphire HD 5570 has all the attributes to become your HTPC card – it’s low profile, doesn’t consume much, is HDMI ready, supports Dolby TrueHD and DTS-HD audio bit streaming, features DirectX 11 support, etc. The problem is the price. While AMD announced a price around €55, the cards is now listed for about €70 to €80 which is too close to the HD 5670 which offers much better performance. But we hope, prices will decline.



 


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Last modified on 24 September 2010
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