Gigabyte HD 5670 OC Review - PAGE 2

Impressions

The HD 5670 is ATI's primary representative of ATI's mid-range offerings right now. From our previous testings, we'd put the HD 5750 in the high mid-range, and the HD 5770 in the low high-range, of gaming performance. Below the HD 5670, we have the recently released low-end 5450, and a step in between the two is also expect to be released sometime soon. 

The HD 5670 comes in 512MB and 1GB versions -- today's Gigabyte HD 5670 is a 1GB card.

Similar to the our recent review of the Gigabyte GT 240 (Nvidia's alternative to a video card around this $100 price point), Gigabyte has given a customized treatment to this HD 5670. We are left with something pretty much the same in function as the reference design HD 5670 we first reviewed, but arranged somewhat differently. Both the cooler and the printed circuit board have been tweaked by Gigabyte's engineers.

The PCB is blue, for starters; beyond that cosmetic change we have a slightly different arrangement of capacitors and components on the board. Gigabyte used some beefier cap's (though used fewer MOFETS) and seemed to have made good use of the real estate of the PCB. Size-wise, the Gigabyte HD 5670 is the same as the reference board design, which we have already reviewed, coming in at 6.5". 

The cooler has also been changed -- using the same design as the found on the Gigabyte GT 240, but with a slightly different plastic cover. This cooler uses much more aluminum than the reference board design cooler, and additionally, has a much larger fan. This should most certainly superior cooling for the GPU -- though, however, the memory chips do not receive any heatsink coverage like they do in the reference board. 

The Gigabyte HD 5670 offers good flexibility with the output display options: you get a VGA, DVI, and HDMI port. As with all products in the ATI HD 5000 series, you have Eyefinity capability as well, which allows you to connect up to 3 displays to your video card, simultaneously. However, just remember that running 3 displays for desktop stuff is fine; but if you want to game on 3 displays, you'll likely require a video card for more horsepower, in order to achieve acceptable framerates. Helping this situation out though is CrossFireX -- you can mix-and-match different HD 3000, HD 4000, and HD 5000 video cards; so, if you want more performance down the line, and your motherboard supports it, you have the option of buying a second video card for system.

The Gigabyte HD 5670 beside a reference design HD 5670, and beside a Gigabyte GT 240

That's actually one thing we apologize for being remiss about, with our last review of the HD 5670 -- only the 1GB version has CrossFireX capabilities. The 512MB version is lacking the teeth for it. This is understandable move on ATI's part, from a marketing perspective -- the extra 512MB of memory, time and time again shown in our benchmarking, usually has a negible affect on performance. So, having that CrossFire compatibility with the 1GB model makes the $20 price premium seem more reasonable.

Specifications

With Nvidia's next generation of GPU delayed for a while now, ATI is the only current way to go if you need a DirectX 11 capable GPU, such as found in today's HD 5670. It remains to be seen how important, or how unimportant, DirectX 11 will be for those who are into playing PC games. It is our guess it'll be 2011 or 2012 even, before DirectX 11 really makes a significant appearance in titles, beyond window-dressing. But either way, it is good to be prepared, if the option is available. 

In addition the DirectX 11 support, you get the additional selection of HD 5000 series features, including PCI Express 2.0 and Shader Model 5.0 support, the UVD video engine (which improves HD video content playback, and ATI Stream , which speeds up Flash content.

As you can see in the chart below, the HD 5670 has 400 stream processors. This is about half the amount found in the HD 5770. This card also has a 128-bit memory interface. In the last few generations, 128-bit memory interfaces generally meant pretty sad performance -- but this isn't as much a factor this time around, because of the high-speed GDDR5 memory used.

Finally, note that this is a overclocked model of the HD 5670 offered by Gigabyte here today -- but it is pretty much just a OC model in name. The core clock has boosted a paltry 10 MHz, while the memory clock has not been increased. OC models really don't come less OC'ed than this! 10 MHz on the core should only lead to a insignificant performance increase of about 2% tops.