Today AMD has released the ATI Radeon HD 5670, which includes most of the features of the other cards in the 5000 series but costs only $99.
This is a great card for those you who are on a budget when it comes to gaming or have a machine with a small power supply. The card performs very well at resolutions 1,920 by 1,200 pixels and below. It supports the new DirectX 11, as well the older DirectX 9, 10, 10.1, and OpenGL 3.2.
While I did not get to run performance tests, the 5670 looked very solid in the demos when I visited with AMD at CES. But I did not. I am not a very good player when it comes to Left4Dead 2.
The 5670 includes support for up to three monitors with independent resolutions, refresh rates and color controls. There is also support for ATI’s Eyefinity technology, which lets you stretch your display over multiple monitors; ATI Stream, which can unite the power of the GPU and CPU for certain computing tasks such as video transcoding (converting your home HD movies for your iPod) and improve/sharpen video playback. The HD 5670 also has support for Windows 7 DirectCompute 11. DirectCompute enables applications in Windows 7 to take advantage of GPU computing to accelerate applications
Fast Specs
- 620 GigaFLOPS of compute power
- Core clock speed of 775 MHz
- 400 stream processors
- GDDR5 memory
On the audio side there is an integrated HD audio controller which supports high bit rate 7.1 channel surround sound over HDMI 1.3. Audio formats supported include AC-3, AAC, Dolby TrueHD and DTS Master Audio formats.
The low power needs and audio capabilities make the HD 5670 a great choice for a media center PC or blu-ray movie viewing. The 5670 draws only about 61 watts of power (14 watts when idle), so it does not need an extra power source besides power drawn from the card slot.
MSI is now selling the R5670-PMD1. It is a 1 GB video card which is based on on the Radeon HD 5670 chip. In addition to HDMI and DVI, the MSI R5670-PMD1G supports DisplayPort, the next generation video interface. Other manufacturers are shipping video cards based on the HD 5670, as well.
Since DirectX 11 games are coming much faster than DirectX 10 did, it might be time take a look at a card like the Radeon HD 5670.
