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.

Packaging

MSI's packaging is fairly compact which helps keep the shipping and storage costs down.

Contents

You will receive:

• Graphics card
• Driver CD + Quick Install Guide

The Card

As mentioned before, MSI has modified AMD's reference PCB to fit their own needs. Please note the AMD PCB number 109-C02037-00C on the top edge of the card, and right next to it you can find MSI's version number V220 Ver. 2.0. Usually when AIBs modify AMD's reference PCB they remove AMD's version number to make it clear that this is not an AMD reference design.


Just like the AMD reference design, the cooler occupies two slots. MSI has chosen to use a cooler that does not use the full height of the slot which will help with air circulation in crowded cases.


The card has one DVI port, one DisplayPort and one HDMI port. For a lower-end card like this I would have preferred to see an analog VGA or DVI+Adapter output instead of the DisplayPort.
For HDMI Audio, most NVIDIA cards require you to feed an external audio source, for example from your motherboard's on-board audio, to the card via SPDIF cable. AMD on the other hand has integrated a sound device inside their GPUs which is the easier solution for most users. Also AMD's integrated sound device has been upgraded to support HDMI 1.3a which includes Dolby TrueHD, DTS-HD, AC-3, DTS and up to 7.1 channel audio with 192 kHz / 24-bit.


Unlike other HD 5670 design cards, MSI has included two CrossFire connectors on their card (but no CF bridge in the package). In case you want to pair your MSI HD 5670 with another HD 5670 that does not have a CF connector, the driver will detect this and run CrossFire via the PCI-Express bus (I tried).


Here are the front and the back of the card, high-res versions are also available (front, back). If you choose to use these images for voltmods etc, please include a link back to this site or let us post your article.