Configuration:

A system with the following components was used for this review:

» Intel Core i7 920 quad core processor
» Gigabyte GA-EX58-UD3R LGA 1366 X58 ATX motherboard (BIOS F6)
» G.Skill 6GB PC3-12800 DDR3 triple channel memory (1600MHz, 9-9-9-24)
» Maxtor MaxLine III 250GB SATA 3Gbps hard drive
» TSST Super WriteMaster optical drive
» Nesteq EECS 700 Watt power supply
» Windows 7 Pro 64-Bit operating system

The screenshots below provide details regarding the Sapphire Radeon HD5670 1GB graphics card as provided by the Catalyst Control Center's Overdrive tab and Techpowerup.com's GPU-Z.



Installation was super simple since the card is so compact and does not require any extra power connections. These two features would make it a great choice for an HTPC or a desktop system. Another plus to using this card in these environments is that the cooler is very quiet. I wouldn't go so far as to call it silent, but it definitely produces minimal noise; even under a heavy load.

Testing:

The following other graphics cards will be compared to the Sapphire Radeon HD5670 1GB card in this review...

» ASUS GTS 250 1GB
» Leadtek GTX260 EXTREME+ 896MB
» Sapphire Vapor-X Radeon HD5870 1GB
» Sapphire Radeon HD5850 1GB
» Sapphire Radeon HD5750 1GB
» Sapphire Radeon HD4890 1GB

The two Nvidia based graphics cards used driver version 196.21, while each Radeon card used the drivers found on the CD provided in their respective boxes.

The tests to be executed are detailed in the list below. Each card was run through the following tests, and the system was rebooted between each run.

» FutureMark 3DMark Vantage (DirectX 10)
» SiSoftware Sandra Rendering (DirectX 10.1)
» Heaven v1.0 (DirectX 11)
» Windows 7 Experience
» Crysis (DirectX 10)
» World in Conflict (DirectX 10)
» Resident Evil 5 (DirectX 10)
» Thermal Testing
» Power Consumption Testing

What we have is a pair of familiar synthetic benchmarks, a fairly new DirectX 11 capable benchmark, a look at the Windows 7 Experience results, three DirectX 10 benchmarks associated with 3D games, some thermal testing, and some power consumption testing. Not all cards listed were able to complete each of these tests (due to various levels of DirectX compatibility), so when you see blanks in the charts this was not by accident.