Radeon HD 5670 review (Crossfire tested) - Introduction

AMD's ATI Radeon HD 5670

In a discourteous endeavor to dominate every segment in the DX11 market ATI is covering all the bases with very strong products in the high-end and mid-range segment. The slowest DX11 card one can buy is in fact the Radeon HD 5750 and good gosh man, that card oozes performance.

It's therefore not exactly a surprise or even secret that there is a gap left in the now very wide range of ATI DX11 card lineup. Yes my fellow Guru's today we are going second base in the upper budget segment. Cards that typically can be found in a 75 EUR / 95 USD price range often offering a somewhat below average gaming experience. However with the right monitor resolution and settings, one is almost always getting most bang for buck.

Today ATI releases thus the Radeon series 5600. Actually Radeon HD 5650 and 5670 today to be specific -- we'll be looking at a couple of these cards. These cards offer a wide variety in functionality, but even in the new budget products, ATI put in enough transistors to allow you to play modern games well -- if you give them the right circumstances that is. The card we'll be testing today is lined up directly against NVIDIA's GeForce GT 240 products, with the Radeon HD 5670 being slightly faster, DX11 compatible and sure .. ATI threw in Eyefinity as well.

But wait -- there's more though. Obviously we will all agree that a new trend that has been up and coming over the past two to three years are HTPCs. And that's exactly an area where the Radeon HD 5670 will rise and shine hard, as it has more than enough shader power to post process your high-definition content and it's armed with the very best in image quality outputs with the digital HDMI and DisplayPort even supporting 7.1 audio and Dolby True HD and DTS Master Audio as well.

Overall features? Much like the rest of the Radeon HD 5000 family ATI has been focusing on three primary features, and key selling points for the series 5000 products. First off, the new graphics adapters are of course DirectX 11 ready. With Windows 7 and Vista being DX11 ready, all we need are some games to take advantage of DirectCompute, multi-threading, Hardware Tessellation and new shader 5.0 extensions. DX11 is going to be good.

Another big feature of the product that you already learned about is Eyefinity, the ability to connect one to up-to six monitors (depending on AIC/AIB choices in outputs) to your videocard and use it in a desktop environment, or to create an incredibly wide monitor resolution to play games in. It's nice, it is niche and yes... certainly not an option many of you will use... but really it is breathtaking as well. Though really too little power to do so, the card does support Eyefinity up-to 4 monitors.

Though ATI's Series 5000 cards have been hard to get, due to yield issues at TSMC's 40nm node, things seem to be slowly picking up now and as such that was a good for AMD to cease the moment and add a new product series to their already extensive DX11 lineup.

Let's go and find out what the Radeon HD 5670 has hidden under it's hood shall we ?