Introduction

AMD is on a relentless mission to have a lineup of DirectX 11 compliant graphics cards, top to bottom. The company started off with the Radeon HD 5800 series and HD 5970 which gave the industry its fastest GPU and graphics cards to date, and went lower down the market strata along with the Radeon HD 5700 series. AMD then entered the crucial mainstream segment, where all the action lies in terms of sales. This where GPU vendors make their most revenue.

Last month, AMD released the Radeon HD 5670, which marked introduction of its new mainstream GPU, codenamed "Redwood". This 40 nm based GPU has 400 stream processors, 8 Raster Operation units, a 128-bit wide memory interface, and the feature-set it inherited from the Evergreen family of GPUs. With Radeon HD 5670, Redwood was able to use up to 1 GB of GDDR5 memory. The new Radeon HD 5570 we're going to review today, is carved out of HD 5670, by making the card use GDDR3 memory, and have slightly lower clock speeds, instead. The Radeon HD 5570 targets a price-point that's around $20 lower than the HD 5670. AMD also stresses on the point that HD 5570 is slim form-factor (SFF) friendly, which also gives away on the target applications of this card: either high resolution, multi-head productivity with HD video, or sub-HD resolution gaming with decent visual effects.

Sapphire's implementation of the HD 5570 we're about to review, is intended to be just that - SFF friendly, and has a single-slot, low-profile built. It packs 1 GB of GDDR3 memory, reference clock speeds, and basic connectivity - identical to the reference design.