Date:
Thursday , January 14, 2010
Author:
Brent Justice
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AMD's ATI Radeon HD 5670 Review

AMD brings DX11 down to the sub-$100 level today with the launch of the ATI Radeon HD 5670. This new video card marks DX11’s entrance into the low-end realm, but does it have the performance needed to use the special DX11 features like Tessellation in games? We run this video card through its paces and use DiRT 2 to find this out. We also compare to the GeForce GT 240 and Radeon HD 5750.

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Test System Setup

We will be using a Gigabyte EX58-UD5 motherboard, an Intel Core i7 920 Overclocked at 3.6GHz, and 6GB of Corsair TR3X6G1600C8D Dominator DDR3.

While it might be "overkill," we use the Core i7-920 processor at 3.6GHz in an attempt to keep prevent our evaluation from being CPU limited. Obviously, we make every effort to not use CPU limited games for video card evaluations, but the i7-920 at 3.6GHz seems to put many peoples’ minds at ease when it comes to that subject.

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We are using the latest drivers provided by AMD for the Radeon HD 5670 and Radeon HD 5750, "ATI_RedwoodXT_8.69_RC3_VistaWin7_Dec16." For the GeForce GT 240 we are using the latest Beta driver, 195.81.

Evaluation Method

We evaluate what each video card configuration can supply us in terms of a playable gaming experience while supplying the best culmination of resolution and "eye candy" graphical settings. We focus on quality and immersion of the gameplay experience rather than how many frames per second the card can get in a canned benchmark or prerecorded timedemo situation that often do not represent real gameplay like you would experience at home. Then we will follow with apples-to-apples testing in with minimum, maximum, and average framerates.