Sapphire Radeon HD 6670 Review - PAGE 1

Just a few days ago AMD expanded the Northern Islands family with the release of their Turks GPU, which effectively brought three new graphics cards to the market: the Radeon HD 6450, HD 6570 and HD 6670. All three of the recently released models are priced under $100, which places them in a segment ranging from entry-level to the lower mid-range. Neoseeker was among the lucky sites to receive an engineering sample of the new products when AMD first launched these new graphics cards, and in this review we are going to continue our analysis of Turks based graphics cards.

Prior to the launch of the new graphics cards, AMD shared with us that many of the models released by their partners would use a custom design. This means that each model released can have its own unique style, thermal solution and PCB. One such model to do just that is the new HD 6670 designed by Sapphire.

The Sapphire HD 6670 uses the reference specifications, which gives this card a GPU clocked at 800MHz, along with 480 stream processors, 24 texture units and 8 ROPs. The card also includes a 1GB GDDR frame buffer that runs on a 128-bit interface. However, where Sapphire has improved upon the design is a custom thermal solution designed by Arctic Cooling that will allow the card to run cool and virtually silent.

Unlike the other graphics cards released thus far in the 6000 series, the HD 6670 is not designed for high-end gaming. It is instead intended to enhance general computing via technologies such as Eyefinity, Accelerated Parallel Processing, HD3D support and Microsoft DirectX 11. Each will allow the HD 6670 to increase productivity by enabling multi-monitor support, and increase the overall performance in tasks such as video editing and HD content playback.