ATI Radeon HD 5570 – Sub-$100 HTPC & Gaming Solution

[PAGETITLE=Introduction][Top Ad] Last Thursday, AMD introduced the newest member of its HD 5000-series, the $50 - $60 Radeon HD 5450. From its price-point alone, it's easy to understand which market AMD was aiming for, and where that's concerned, the card impressed. So much so, in fact, that we awarded it our Editor's Choice award. For the money, the HD 5450 is packed and does well to keep NVIDIA at bay... for now. In our launch article for that card, we mentioned that more cards were en route, and right on schedule, here we are with the HD 5570, a model that pretty-well falls right in between the HD 5450 and HD 5670. This card is set to retail for around $80, and given its specifications, its looks to be a superb buy when compared to the HD 5450. Sure, it may cost 60% more, but it's also about 300% faster. Since the middle of January, AMD has done well to round out its entire line-up, and we're still not done. On January 15th, the company released its $100 HD 5670, and just last week, it followed-up with the $50 HD 5450. Today's card is of course the $80 HD 5570. The next card to launch will be the HD 5830, and that should happen within the next couple of weeks. So who exactly is the HD 5570 designed for? It's tough to be too precise about its market placement, because even the HD 5670 couldn't be considered a true gaming card, and here we are with a model even slower than it. It's also impossible to call it an ideal HTPC card also, since any HD 5000-series card could be considered as such, even the $50 HD 5450. AMD places the HD 5570 somewhere in the middle, where the card is far more capable than the HD 5450 gaming-wise, but is still priced well below the $100 mark. For all intents and purposes, judging simply by the cover, this card would make a great HTPC card if some gaming is in the plan, as the actual form-factor of the card is much, much smaller than the HD 5670. As seen in the slide above and the table below, the HD 5570 is placed well above the HD 5450 in terms of overall capabilities, with 5x the stream processors and a much wider memory bus. The memory clock has also been given a minor boost, of about 12%. Though the HD 5570 can be configured with 512MB of GDDR, chances are good that the most common configuration will be 1GB. Model Core MHz Mem MHz Memory Bus Width Processors Radeon HD 5970 725 1000 2048MB 256-bit 1600 x 2 Radeon HD 5870 850 1200 1024MB 256-bit 1600 Radeon HD 5850 725 1000 1024MB 256-bit 1440 Radeon HD 5830 ??? ??? ???MB ???-bit ??? Radeon HD 5770 850 1200 1024MB 128-bit 800 Radeon HD 5750 700 1150 512MB - 1GB 128-bit 720 Radeon HD 5670 775 1000 512MB - 1GB 128-bit 400 Radeon HD 5570 650 900 512MB - 1GB 128-bit 400 Radeon HD 5450 650 800 512MB - 1GB 64-bit 80 For our testing pleasure, we received the reference card straight from AMD, while Sapphire sent us its version of the card as well. From almost all perspectives, both cards are identical, from the specifications to the PCB design to the cooler layout. Because these cards are so exact, we performed our testing only with Sapphire's card. Like most other current HTPC-friendly cards, Sapphire bundles its cards with two different "LP" (low-profile) brackets, in case you plan to install the card into a very, very small chassis. Compared to the HD 5450 reference design, the coolers seen on the HD 5570 could be considered boring. But, looks isn't the main goal here, but rather performance and cooling-ability. The fans on these cards don't get all too noisy during full load, but I still wouldn't be surprised to see passive versions become available from certain vendors in the near-future. On the following page, we'll be taking a quick look at both our test machine specifications and methodologies, and then we'll begin a look through our results starting with Modern Warfare 2. [PAGEBREAK][PAGETITLE=Test System & Methodology] At Techgage, we strive to make sure our results are as accurate as possible. Our testing is rigorous and time-consuming, but we feel the effort is worth it. In an attempt to leave no question unanswered, this page contains not only our testbed specifications, but also a fully-detailed look at how we conduct our testing. For an exhaustive look at our methodologies, even down to the Windows Vista installation, please refer to this article. Test Machine. The below table lists our testing machine's hardware, which remains unchanged throughout all GPU testing, minus the graphics card. Each card used for comparison is also listed here, along with the driver version used. Each one of the URLs in this table can be clicked to view the respective review of that product, or if a review doesn't exist, it will bring you to the product on the manufacturer's website. Component Model Processor Intel Core i7-975 Extreme Edition - Quad-Core, 3.33GHz, 1.33v Motherboard Gigabyte GA-EX58-EXTREME - X58-based, F7 BIOS (05/11/09) Memory Corsair DOMINATOR - DDR3-1333 7-7-7-24-1T, 1.60 ATI Graphics Radeon HD 5870 1GB (Sapphire) - Catalyst 9.10 Radeon HD 5850 1GB (ASUS) - Catalyst 9.10 Radeon HD 5770 1GB (Reference) - Beta Catalyst (10/06/09) Radeon HD 5750 1GB (Sapphire) - Catalyst 9.11 Radeon HD 5670 512MB (Reference) - Beta Catalyst (12/16/09) Radeon HD 5570 1GB (Sapphire) - Beta Catalyst (12/11/09) Radeon HD 5450 512MB (Reference) - Beta Catalyst (12/11/09) NVIDIA Graphics GeForce GTX 295 1792MB (Reference) - GeForce 186.18 GeForce GTX 285 1GB (EVGA) - GeForce 186.18 GeForce GTX 275 896MB (Reference) - GeForce 186.18 GeForce GTX 260 896MB (XFX) - GeForce 186.18 GeForce GTS 250 1GB (EVGA) - GeForce 186.18 GeForce GT 240 512MB (ASUS) - GeForce 196.21 GeForce GT 220 1GB (ASUS) - GeForce 196.21 GeForce 210 512MB (ASUS) - GeForce 196.21 Audio On-Board Audio Storage Seagate Barracuda 500GB 7200.11 Power Supply Corsair HX1000W Chassis SilverStone TJ10 Full-Tower Display Gateway XHD3000 30" Cooling Thermalright TRUE Black 120 Et cetera Windows Vista Ultimate 64-bit When preparing our testbeds for any type of performance testing, we follow these guidelines: General Guidelines No power-saving options are enabled in the motherboard's BIOS. Internet is disabled. No Virus Scanner or Firewall is installed. The OS is kept clean; no scrap files are left in between runs. Hard drives affected are defragged with PerfectDisk 10 prior to a fresh benchmarking run. Machine has proper airflow and the room temperature is 80°F (27°C) or less. To aide with the goal of keeping accurate and repeatable results, we alter certain services in Windows Vista from starting up at boot. This is due to the fact that these services have the tendency to start up in the background without notice, potentially causing slightly inaccurate results. Disabling "Windows Search" turns off the OS' indexing which can at times utilize the hard drive and memory more than we'd like. Services Disabled Prior to Benchmarking PerfectDisk 10. Windows Defender. Windows Error Reporting Service. Windows Event Log. Windows Firewall. Windows Search. Windows Update. For more robust information on how we tweak Windows, please refer once again to this article. Game Titles. At this time, we currently benchmark all of our games using three popular resolutions: 1680x1050, 1920x1080 and also 2560x1600. 1680x1050 was chosen as it's one of the most popular resolutions for gamers sporting ~20" displays. 1920x1080 might stand out, since we've always used 1920x1200 in the past, but we didn't make this change without some serious thought. After taking a look at the current landscape for desktop monitors around ~24", we noticed that 1920x1200 is definitely on the way out, as more and more models are coming out as native 1080p. It's for this reason that we chose it. Finally, for high-end gamers, we also benchmark using 2560x1600, a resolution that's just about 2x 1080p. For graphics cards that include less than 1GB of GDDR, we omit Grand Theft Auto IV from our testing, as our chosen detail settings require at least 800MB of available graphics memory. Also, if the card we're benchmarking doesn't offer the performance to handle 2560x1600 across most of our titles reliably, only 1680x1050 and 1920x1080 will be utilized. Because we value results generated by real-world testing, we don't utilize timedemos whatsoever. The possible exception might be Futuremark's 3DMark Vantage. Though it's not a game, it essentially acts as a robust timedemo. We choose to use it as it's a standard where GPU reviews are concerned, and we don't want to rid our readers of results they expect to see. All of our results are captured with the help of Beepa's FRAPS 2.98, while stress-testing and temperature-monitoring is handled by OCCT 3.1.0 and GPU-Z, respectively. Call of Duty: Modern Warfare 2. Call of Juarez: Bound in Blood. Crysis Warhead. F.E.A.R. 2: Project Origin. Race Driver: GRID. World in Conflict: Soviet Assault. [PAGEBREAK][PAGETITLE=Call of Duty: Modern Warfare 2] When the original Call of Duty game launched in 2003, Infinity Ward was an unknown. Naturally... it was the company's first title. But since then, the series and company alike have become household names. Not only has the series delivered consistently incredible gameplay, it's pushed the graphics envelope with each successive release, and where Modern Warfare is concerned, it's also had a rich storyline. The first two titles might have been built on the already-outdated Quake III engine, but since then, the games have been built with improved graphical features, capable of pushing the highest-end PCs out there. Modern Warfare 2 is the first such exception, as it's more of a console port than a true PC title. Therefore, the game doesn't push PC hardware as much as we'd like to see, but despite that, it still looks great, and lacks little in the graphics department. You can read our review of the game here. Manual Run-through: The level chosen is the 10th mission in the game, "The Gulag". Our teams fly in helicopters up to an old prison with the intention of getting...

ATI Radeon HD 5570 – Sub-$100 HTPC & Gaming Solution

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Rob Williams