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
5500 Series and 5450 Pre-Announcement
Along with today’s launch, AMD is also pre-announcing the 5500 series and the 5450. We say pre-announcing as they’re not launching the cards today, nor are they showing off the complete specifications of the cards. Today is an announcement of what they’ll be launching in February, the 6th and final month in their 6 month 4 chip launch window for the Evergreen family.
We’ll start with the 5500 series. There is one card pre-announced thus far, which we expect will get a real name (e.g. 5570) at launch. The 5500 series is specified for less than 50W load power, and will be a low-profile actively cooled card. In a full-height computer, a 3rd display output port can be attached, giving the card the ability to drive 3 monitors in an Eyefinity configuration.
The other card is the 5450, which is another low-profile card, but this time passively cooled. It too can drive 3 monitors in Eyefinity mode when put in a full-sized case to allow a 3rd display output. We don’t know what the power usage is, beyond the fact that AMD is calling it an “ultra low power” card.
Both of these cards will have the full 5000 series feature set, most importantly including audio bitstreaming. This should make either of these cards the great HTPC card we’ve been expecting to come out of the 5000 series, depending on how much rendering power you need.
As we stated before, both of these cards will be launching sometime in February. We do know more about these cards, but at this point we’re not allowed to talk about them. What we can suggest is that you look at our Mobility Radeon 5000 article, where AMD announced Redwood and Cedar in mobile form ahead of the desktop cards, and then take a very close look at this slide of AMD’s chip stack. The astute among you should be able to infer some additional information about these forthcoming cards.
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Spoelie - Friday, January 15, 2010 - link
Because the GPU can never truly be isolated, the CPU/memory/buses need to perform some work too to keep the GPU fed with data and instructions to process.Slaimus - Thursday, January 14, 2010 - link
It is not too long ago that the Geforce 6200 debuted at $150. Low end gaming cards are slowly pickup up prices again.dagamer34 - Thursday, January 14, 2010 - link
When do the low profile 5650/5670 cards come out? I've been waiting one for my HTPC to bitstream Blu-ray HD codecs.SmCaudata - Thursday, January 14, 2010 - link
Unless you already have an HTPC why would anyone get this card. If building a new HTPC you could get a Clarkdale to bitstream the audio-codecs.Also...why do we care if it is bitstreamed? I have a reciever that can decode this but it doesn't matter if the digital information is converted to PCM before or after the HDMI cable. The only advantage is to see those lights on the front of my reciever...
papapapapapapapababy - Thursday, January 14, 2010 - link
future what? dx11 at 5fps? no thanks ati, remember the 4770? that was a good sub $100 card, (thanks) this crap is overpriced, $45 or bust.TheManY2K3 - Thursday, January 14, 2010 - link
Ryan,I don't see any of the applications at 12x10 include data for the 8800GT, however, you are comparing the 8800GT to the HD5670 in most applications.
Could you include the 8800GT in the 12x10 data, so that we can accurately gauge the performance of the HD5670?
Ryan Smith - Thursday, January 14, 2010 - link
The 8800 GT data was originally collected for past articles, where we started at 16x10. The 8800 GT isn't part of my collection (it's Anand's) so I wasn't able to get 12x10 data in time for this article.silverblue - Thursday, January 14, 2010 - link
It's probably fair to point out that, in most tests, the 5670 is very close to the 8800, and as such listing it may not mean anything. However, the 1280x1024 tests are also without AA - it might be nice to see the effect of turning AA on with this oldie but goodie as compared to the more modern competition, so including it may make sense. You may think that the higher core clock of the 5670 would give it an advantage without AA but if it goes anything like Batman, this would probably be an incorrect assumption as well.pjladyfox - Thursday, January 14, 2010 - link
Last I looked ANY Radeon card with the x5xx, x6xx, or x7xx model number was denoted as a mainstream card which is clearly noted here:http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Radeon#Product_naming...">http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Radeon#Product_naming...
By that definition that means that these cards were designed to run in systems that have power supplies from 350 to 400w, support HD quality video, and support games at a resolution of no higher than 1440x900 at medium quality settings with 2x AA and 8x anisotropic filtering. By putting them at settings that most will not run these cards at it makes these results for the most part worthless.
I mean who cares how these cards run at 1920x1200 at high detail settings since we already know they're going to fail anyway? I'm more interested in how these run with all the details on at say 1440x900 or possibly 1680x1050 which are the more common widescreen monitors most people have.
For that matter where are details about how these cards compare running HD quality video, if the fan speed can be controlled via speedfan, or even if they have fixed some of the video quality issues like black crush when outputting via HDMI?
Ryan Smith - Thursday, January 14, 2010 - link
We traditionally run every game at 3 resolutions, particularly since some games are more GPU-intensive than others. Based on the 12x10 performance, I decided that 10x7 would be silly and instead went up a level to 19x12 - a few games were actually playable even at those high resolutions.16x10 is accounted for, and 12x10 is close enough to 14x9 that the results are practically the same.
HD Video: All the 5000 series cards, except perhaps the Cedar are going to be exactly the same.
Fan speed: Can be modified (I use it to cool down the cards before extraction after running FurMark)
Black Crush: I honestly have no idea