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.

Packaging

Sapphire uses a big packaging for their relatively small card. I like how the front has a sticker that says "LP Bracket included" that immediately tells me "Media PC". The back has additional detail but not too in-depth.

Contents

You will receive:

• Graphics card
• Driver CD + Quick Install Guide
• Low profile brackets
• ArcSoft SimHD

The Card

Sapphire's HD 5570 is really compact. If you remove the analog VGA output you can turn it into a single slot, low profile media PC card.


The card uses exactly one slot, nothing protrudes beyond the height of the slot cover.


The card has one DVI port, one HDMI port and one analog VGA output. For a lower-end card this is a perfectly valid output combination. Using an HDMI to DVI adapter (not included) you could use two digital screens.

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.


No CrossFire connectors are present on all these low-end cards, any data that needs to be transferred is sent via the PCI-E bus.


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.