Today we’ll talk about XFX HD 5670 1GB. AMD announced its Radeon HD 5670 card on 14th of January 2010, and it ended up being the only sub-€100 DX11 card. Not long after the HD 5670, AMD followed up with even more affordable DX11 cards – HD 5570, HD 5550 and HD 5450.

Back when ATI had a nicely filled out DirectX 11 offer, Nvidia was struggling to announce its Fermi GF100 based high end GTX 480 and GTX 470 cards. It turned out thatGF100, which was announced on 26th of March, was indeed powerful but it was also large, hot and expensive to make, so Nvidia had to get down to business once again and launch the GF104.

Nvidia launched Geforce GTX 460 on 12th of July and we’re talking about a card based on GF104, which is much smaller and rakes in more profit than the GF100, but Nvidia still has no answer for the budget market. As you could’ve guessed already, our today’s card belongs in the budget market segment, whereas Nvidia’s more affordable Geforce DX11 cards won’t be ready before the end of august or back-to-school period.

Radeon HD 5670 is based on the RV830 40nm chip codenamed Redwood and it belongs to Evergreen family of DirectX 11 cards. Redwood, just like all the ATI chips so far, has been announced in two flavors; Redwood XT is used on Radeon HD 5670 whereas the slower Redwood LE ended up on Radeon HD 5570 and HD 5550 cards. The slowest ATI DirectX11 card uses Cedar chip and it’s called Radeon HD 5450.

HD 5670 is the fastest PCI-E powered Evergreen card, making this an interesting choice for HTPC owners – the card doesn’t consume much but it packs enough punch for multimedia and occasional gaming at lower detail settings. All the power is fed via the PCI-E slot, which means the card won’t consume more than 75W. AMD says the card’s maximum TDP is at 65W, whereas in idle mode it consumes only 15W.

Redwood XT chip comes with 400 stream processors, which is one quarter of what ATI’s fastest Evergreen cards have (1600). Let us refresh your memory – above Redwood you’ll find Juniper GPUs (HD 5770), which pack 800 stream processors and 128-bit memory interface. The fastest chip in the Evergreen family is known as Cypress and it comes with 1600 stream processors. Cypress-based cards (HD 5870/HD 5850) come with 256-bit memory interface and use GDDR5.

Radeon HD 5670 comes with 8 raster operation units (ROPs), 20 texture mapping units and with GDDR5 memory combined with 128-bit memory interface. Specs say that the HD 5670 isn’t your go-to card when it comes to gaming, but it does come with UVD 2.2 and will be great for multimedia. 

Our XFX HD 5670 card comes with 1GB of memory, but you should know that the same card is available with 512MB of GDDR5 memory as well. XFX didn’t change GPU clocks so we’re still talking about reference clocks – 775MHz GPU and 1000MHz (4000MHz effectively) for the GDDR5 memory.