Today sees the launch of the Radeon HD 5670, which sits below the Radeon HD 5700 series in terms of both price and performance to bring DirectX 11 to the $100 price level. It certainly sounds tempting, but is it worth a look for casual gamers or those on a tight budget? Bit-Tech, Bjorn3D, Hardware Canucks, HotHardware, EliteBastards, ModdersInc, NinjaLane, Overclockers Club, PC Perspective and RBMods take a look at Sapphire's 1GB variant of the Radeon HD 5670 to find out.

At the $100 price point you have in the Sapphire HD 5670 is the only Direct X 11 card at this part of the market. The HD 5670 is not really made to be a gaming power house as you have seen from the gaming benchmarks. It is meant to be a discrete graphics card that works as a co processor to improve the computing experience for the masses. Those that do not have the latest and greatest processor from either Intel or AMD or even if they do but have a lower spec chip the HD 5670 should help out in compute intensive applications such as video editing and creating digital content or watching high definition content. For an HTPC this card this card should excel with its native HDMI 1.3 port with Dolby® TrueHD and DTSHD Master AudioTM support, cool temperatures thanks to the Arctic cooling heatsink and power efficiency. When put under load, the entire system pulled a total of 221 watts at the stock clock speeds of 775MHz/1000MHz and only 223 watts when overclocked. Not bad when you look at the gaming performance it delivers against its direct competition the GT 240. It was only soundly beaten in two of the games it was tested in by the GT 240, Call of Duty World at War and Resident Evil 5. Even so it is not a gaming power house but can deliver an acceptable level of play if you compromise on the visual quality to get the performance. With that said this card is leaps and bounds ahead of the HD 4670. Overclocking the HD 5670 will yield some improvement but I was only able to increase the GPU core clock by 120Mhz on the Redwood core and 40MHz on the GDDR5 memory rated to run at 1250Mhz. In part most likely due to the low power consumption of the card. The cooler does its job well and is inaudible unless you ram up the fan speed. As delivered with the driver controlling the fan speeds the idle temperature was 30 degrees Celsius at idle and 51 Celsius under load. When overclocked with the fan speed manually set to 95% the idle speed moved up to 32 degrees Celsius and dropped to 46 Celsius under load. All in all this offering will do the job; it is designed for and fits a niche in the market. At right around 100 dollars the price point is a tight field to play in as for a few bucks more there are cards that offer more performance but then they lack the DX 11 capabilities as well.