A forum member of the HardOCP forums posted pictures and test results of a graphics card that is, allegedly, a prototype of the ATI Radeon HD 5670, a low-end graphics card (not announced). If the report is genuine, the card should be launched sometime in Q1 2010 and is a graphics adapter based on the Redwood 40nm GPU.
The forum member not only posted pictures of the alleged 5670, but also subjected the card to performance tests using the CPU-Z 0.3.7 software on a base system composed of Intel Core i5 750 @ 2.66 GHz, Gigabyte P55M-UD2, and 4 GB of OCZ DDR3-1333 memory. The tests were done as a performance comparison between the card and the Radeon HD 4670 512 MB. The first test was running Street Fighter 4 at a resolution of 1600 x 1200, with no anti-aliasing, 16x anisotropic filtering. The card rendered the game with a frame-rate of 95.35 fps and scored 10,473 points, as opposed to the HD 4670, which only managed 8,559 points (a frame-rate of 65.35 fps).
The second game the card was tested on was Unigine Heaven Demo v1.0 DirectX 10 (SM 4.0) on a resolution of 1024 x 768 in window mode. The game ran at 34.1 fps while the CPU operated at 2.53 GHz. The HD 5670 again bested the HD 4670, which only scored 699 points with its 27.8 fps, with 859 points.
The pictures shown on the forum represent an engineering sample of the card, which has a red-colored PCB, as opposed to the traditional black PCB used by the HD 5000 series. The cooler employed by the prototype used a normal fan that was set upon a very simple heatsink with fins projecting radially. The card showed DVI, HDMI, and D-Sub connectors and the possibility for future DisplayPort implementation suggested by the leads behind the D-sub. The CPU-Z report picture indicates an SIMD 50% downscaled, 400 stream processors, 128-bit GDDR5 and 16 ROPs. The screenshot also suggests that the core and the 1GB memory clocks equal 775 MHz and 1000 MHz, respectively. This implies that the card's memory bandwidh is of 64 GB/s.
Although nothing is official, if the alleged Radeon HD 5670 photos do prove out to be genuine, low-end users will be able to start the year with a graphics card updgrade.
