AMD's Radeon HD 5670: Sub-$100 DirectX 11 Starts Today
by Ryan Smith on January 14, 2010 12:00 AM EST- Posted in
- GPUs
Meet The 5670
Today’s launch is the Redwood based Radeon HD 5670. The 5670 is a full Redwood card, with all of its functional units enabled and running at its “full” clockspeed. The card we’re looking at is clocked at 775MHz core, and 1GHz(4GHz data rate) on the GDDR5 RAM. With a 128-bit memory bus, this gives the card 64GB/sec of memory bandwidth.
AMD stock photo, our sample boards are black and don't have CF connectors
AMD will be launching the card in a 512MB and 1GB configuration. The $99 card we’re looking at is a 512MB model, while the 1GB model will run $15-$20 more.
Attached to the card are 4 128MB Hynix GDDR5 RAM chips. These chips are specified for a 4GHz data rate, so AMD is only finally pairing up 5000-series cards with appropriately fast RAM. What this means is that unlike the 5700 and 5800 series, there won’t be any freebie memory overclocking to take advantage of the gap between the card’s clocks and what the RAM is specified for. What you see is what you get.
As is common for cards targeted at the sub-$100 price range, the 5670 runs sans external power. AMD puts the TDP for the card at 61W, which compares favorably to the 70W of the GT 240 that we saw last week. AMD tells us that they were merely designing this card to be under 75W, and that the 61W TDP of the shipping product is a good bit lower than they had been planning on.
With the lower power usage of this card, the need for a dual-slot cooler (and the 5000 series distinctive shroud) is gone. The 5670 is equipped with a slightly larger than normal single-slot blower, which blows air towards the front of the card. We call this cooler slightly larger than normal since AMD has extended the heatsink portion slightly to cover all of the GDDR5 RAM chips on the card, as evidenced by the heatsink jutting out of the top. This is an interesting design choice from AMD, since other cards like the 5750 do not apply any cooling to the GDDR5 RAM chips. This does leave us wondering whether cooling the RAM is necessary, or if AMD is doing it for cosmetic reasons.
The card measures at 6.61”, and finally drops AMD’s traditional Eyefinity port configuration. By moving to a single slot, AMD has dropped the 2nd DVI port, leaving the card with a DisplayPort, an HDMI port, and a dual-link DVI port. The card will be able to drive a second DVI monitor using an HDMI-to-DVI adapter, although only a single link. The 5670 still has full Eyefinity capabilities, and a 3rd monitor can be hooked up to the DisplayPort for that task. AMD tells us that the Redwood chip can actually drive 4 monitors, but none of the launch cards will configured for that (not that the 5800 cards were either). AMD’s ideal Eyefintiy configuration for this card is to pair it up with a trio of cheap 16:9 19” monitors, although as we’ll see the card doesn’t really have enough power for gaming like this.
The need for an active DisplayPort adapter is still an issue however, and at $99 the adapters are as much if not more than the card itself. At this point the best solution is a DisplayPort native monitor, but those are still fairly rare and seldom cheap.
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JonnyDough - Sunday, January 17, 2010 - link
It's always good to see new cards rolling off the line that don't require me to open another coal-powered power plant in my town.PR3ACH3R - Monday, January 25, 2010 - link
The current situation with Anandtech ATI reports & coverage is absolutely absurd, & so disappointing,I do not even know where to start.
It seems like nothing is done by pros anymore at Anandtech.
From the endless 57XX Driver bugs, To the flaky incomplete & undocumented DXVA features,
To the High DPC usage in anything not 3d/dxva
all the way to the poorest 2d performance ever seen on the pc (this is not an exaggerated comment), NOTHING is discovered by Anadtech.
You have become a commercial, biased, & unprofessional, overrated site.
So there, I have done the work for you,
go check these issues & let's see when you will get the staff professional enough to analyze or even notice all the above.
529th - Friday, January 15, 2010 - link
According to benchmark reviews the 4670 idles at 9w - the way they come to this conclusion is they boot the pc without the vid card and run the psu cord through a Kill-A-Watt EZ P4460 wall socket mount that reads the wattage draw, take that number for system idle power and then run it against the system at idle with the card for a base number, then they run it through some 3D titles for total draw..7Enigma - Friday, January 15, 2010 - link
There is no marketing or business decision to continue producing the 4850. It's more expensive to make than the reviewed card, and it's making the new cards look like crap. I personally believe the Far Cry 2 data is not correct (it makes no sense), but in everything else the 4850 is significantly faster.I'm actually surprised AMD would be stupid enough to continue producing (not just selling out of existing stock) the 4850...they are shooting themselves in the foot and making their "new" product lineup underwhelming.
Hint, hint, if you are in the market for a card in this price range and don't care about power requirements or small size (ie HTPC), get the 4850 NOW. I can't imagine it will be around next month unless AMD is completely clueless (which I believe they are not).
peakchua - Friday, May 7, 2010 - link
hey im a noob on GPU'S :) is the 4850 better than the 5670? I own an imac :) with a mobility 4850, if apple upgraded to a mobilit 5750, would it be considerably faster? I tried asking apple but as usual they never reply :)JimmiG - Friday, January 15, 2010 - link
It seems not a single card in the 5-series bring you more performance at a particular price point. There's always a card from the 4-series that beats the 5-series and costs less. Why this trade off between performance and features? It's either a slower card with more features or a faster card with less features...This is completely unlike the 4-series, which revolutionized performance at every price point.
Guess things will change in, oh, about a year, when Fermi-derived cards are out at all price points...
marc1000 - Friday, January 15, 2010 - link
If we can expect the same "downsizing" that Nvidia did for the GT200, then there will be low-end Fermi's only in 2013....rjc - Friday, January 15, 2010 - link
On th first page of the article it said launch volume would be around 50k units and that is expected to be sufficient.Is that figure for US only? if it's the whole world, it works out about 1 card each for all the retail stores that sell graphic cards. Even with the price set high as it is would think a much greater supply is needed.
From here: http://jonpeddie.com/press-releases/details/reboun...">http://jonpeddie.com/press-releases/det...-for-the...
The market for grphics cards is about 20m units per quarter...this card is supposed to be in the mainstream segment would think it would sell in the millions.
ChoadNamath - Thursday, January 14, 2010 - link
How is the load power 63W higher than idle when the TDP is supposed to be only 61W? It sounds like something is funky with your review sample, or AMD's numbers are just wrong.Iketh - Wednesday, February 3, 2010 - link
Hey choad, let's bash AnandTech/AMD on the basis of your ignorance! YEA~!~! It's better to just ask why it's 63w than to assume.