AMD's Radeon HD 5670 can successfully improve over the aging HD 4670. It offers 20% more performance without any power increase or extra heat. This allows AIBs to build cards that are extremely quiet, in our case the HIS HD 5670 IceQ is the quietest actively cooled card that I ever tested. Such a design opens up new possibilities for media PC users who now have a chance to get a silent card that still has decent gaming performance for resolutions up to 1280x1024.
At its current price point of $99 it will be difficult to compete for these cards though. There are plenty of other choices available in this segment that offer more performance even though they lack features like DirectX 11 or EyeFinity which are both not that important in this segment in my opinion. If AMD can get the price of their cards down to the $80 range I am sure they can gain a considerable market share with it. I am confident that this is possible, the GPU is very small and seems to be extremely cheap to manufacture. I also hope that AMD opens up the possibility to make cards using DDR2, DDR3 or GDDR3 instead of the more expensive GDDR5 which also has more complex power requirements.
HIS has done an amazing job with their HD 5670 IceQ. The thermal solution is exceedingly quiet yet offers enough cooling performance to keep the card at decent temperature levels, even with overclocking.