Final words and conclusion

Final words and conclusion

The MSI R5670 Cyclone 1G is a fun product. Though admittedly, the baseline performance of a product like this is nothing that can get me excited. The feature set is really good though. Next to that, when you apply a nice overclock and achieve the same results that we do... you can gain another 20%~25% performance that you'll get for free. But as grand as a 25% overclock really is, it's still 25% of already fairly slow numbers.

The MSI R5670 Cyclone 1G will allow you to play some modern games reasonably at best, we recommend a product like this to users that use monitors with a resolution in the 1280x1024 range. If you play your games at 1600x1200 or higher then the next best thing really is the Radeon HD 5750 or preferably 5770.

So overall the card really is a fun product which you can tweak the living daylights out of, and that is just nice. Pricing then, the MSI R5670 Cyclone 1G will sell for roughly 100 EUR/USD and though we feel that is a reasonable price for what MSI offers with all the customization, we do have to admit, that price is borderline acceptable. In our Guru3D blue colored vision a product like this should cost you roughly 65~75 EUR/USD really.

One topic that I have not addressed very deeply for a card like this, the 5670 is an awesome HTPC card. Combine it with proper software like the free MediaPlayer Classic Home Cinema application and you'll achieve incredible results decoding your high-definition content. Next to that you'll have plenty of shader processors at your disposal to apply a lot of post processing options like image sharpening. So that's a greatly added benefit to a good generic desktop experience as well.

Alright, let's wrap it up, unless you game at 1280x1024 the R5670 as far as I am concerned is not a serious enough card for gaming, you will run into performance limitations sooner rather than later, it offers reasonable performance at best. We say go with a R5750/5770 for much better performance but also acknowledge that many of you cannot spend above a 100 USD/EUR budget. If we leave gaming out of the equation then for the money everything else makes this card an okay product. And I say this with some reservation though, as we feel the overall price of the 5670 series needs to come down a little bit further for them to become really interesting. Other than that, a fun little card that comes recommended -- if you are not a serious gamer that is.

• Leave/read comments on this product
• Sign up to receive a notice when we publish a new article
• Or go back to Guru3D's front page.