Introduction

Last year AMD released their new Radeon HD 5800 Series of graphics cards which quickly became a big success due to the numerous improvements made over previous generations. Over the course of the last months AMD has been adding more cards to their DirectX 11 lineup quickly, the latest is the Radeon HD 5670 which was unveiled on Jan 14. It is based on AMD's Redwood graphics processor which is made in a 40 nm process at TSMC Taiwan.
AMD is pricing their 512 MB HD 5670 cards around a $100 price point, which is a tough market that is crowded with other cards like the GeForce GT 240, 9600 GT and 9800 GT. AMD's own products here are HD 4770, HD 4830 and HD 4850.

MSI has chosen to design a custom PCB that is based heavily on AMD's reference card design - but not identical. They also use different components, for example MSI's SSC chokes. The most important product change is certainly the 1 GB of GDDR5 memory, which is twice that of the reference design which comes only with 512 MB. Last but not least it should be noted that the card tested today has a CrossFire connector, a feature that many HD 5670 cards are missing.