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George Ross, June 15, 2010
ATI's latest surge in the PC gaming market has not been built on having the absolute fastest video cards available but giving the customer a video card that has good performance at decent price points. This has helped the value conscious PC gamers out there to see their games play with higher resolutions and quality settings. Now that DirectX 11 has been out for awhile now ATI has solidified its position in the PC gaming market by offering a complete top to bottom lineup of DirectX 11 supporting video cards. The subject of today's review is closer to the bottom of the pile, but can it offer the kind of performance you are looking for and still be priced under $100?
PowerColor has done a decent job with the packaging of their HD 5670. The card is kept from moving to much during shipping by some bent up cardboard.
All you get with this card is a driver CD and an generic quick install guide that reminds you to plug in your video cards external power cord even though this particular video card doesn't have an external power plug.
This card has a pretty large aluminum heatsink and fan combo that makes it take up two slots. This card also has CrossFire connectors and this is something that not all HD 5670's possess. As far as connectors go you get D-Sub, DVI, and HDMI on the card with no included adapters. I would have rather seen a DVI to D-Sub adapter and DisplayPort connector on the card instead of the D-Sub.
This particular HD 5670 is a good overclocker it managed to get a 65Mhz boost in core frequency and a 40Mhz boost in the memory frequency. This 8% increase in core clock speed and 4% increase in memory speed resulted in a 6% increase in overall average frames per second across all game tests as you will see below.
| Processor | Intel Core i7-920 @ 3.4GHz | ||||
| Motherboard | EVGA E758-TR | ||||
| Memory | G.SKILL Trident 6GB DDR3 2000 (PC3 16000) @ 813 MHz (DDR 1626) 11-11-11-28 Triple Channel Mode | ||||
| Hard Drive | Seagate Barracuda ES.2 ST3250310NS 250GB 7200 RPM 32MB cache SATA 3.0Gb/s | ||||
| Video Card | PowerColor Radeon HD 5670 @ 775 MHz core 1,000 MHz (4,000 Gb/s) memory Catalyst 10.4 |
PowerColor Radeon HD 5670 @ 840 MHz core 1,040 MHz (4,160 Gb/s) memory Catalyst 10.4 |
GeForce 8800GT @ 738MHz Core 1836MHz Shader 1000MHz Memory Driver 197.45 |
Radeon HD 4850 @ 625 MHz core 993 MHz (1986DDR) memory Catalyst 10.4 |
Radeon HD 4890 @ 900 MHz core 1,000 MHz (4,000 Gb/s) memory Catalyst 10.4 |
| Optical Disk Drive | Pioneer DVR-115DBK | ||||
| Power Supply | Seventeam ST-850PAF 850W | ||||
| Operating System | Windows 7 Ultimate x64 | ||||
You may have noticed that the 8800GT OC didn't complete its Crysis runs at the high and very high settings at 1900x1200 resolution with 8xAA. This has never happened before with this card and even after much tweaking I could not get that card to run those two tests. Every other test ran without any problems.
The HD 5670 may not be the fastest video card out there but if the games you are playing are not as taxing on a system as let's say Crysis or S.T.A.L.K.E.R. Call of Pripyat. Then the HD 5670 offers solid performance at lower resolutions and depending on the game at higher resolutions as well.
As you can see DirectX 11 doesn't make that big of a difference in S.T.A.L.K.E.R. call of Pripyat, but when you look at a synthetic benchmark like Unigine's Heaven benchmark there is a clear differnce.
