XFX Radeon HD 5670

XFX Radeon HD 5670

Can you get great gaming performance for $99? That’s the burning question we wanted to answer when the XFX Radeon HD 5670 arrived. The version we tested, with 512MB of GDDR5, can be found for just under a hundred buckazoids on the web. The other question: How well does it stack up against a similarly priced Nvidia card? Like other Radeon 5000 series GPUs, the 5670 chip is built on a 40nm manufacturing process. For those still trying to wrap their heads around the huge size of the Radeon HD 5970, the 5670 is a mere 6.5 inches long, occupies just a single PCI-E slot, and has no requirements for a power connector. The two cards, of course, are not in the same class. The HD 5670 has half the stream processors, texture units, and ROPs of the Radeon HD 5770. The GPU core is also clocked lower, as is the GDDR5 memory. With these specs, we expected something to give when running games. Sure enough, when we tried running modern games at 1680x1050 at high detail, the frame rates were unacceptable. Antialiasing? No way. We took the XFX card for a spin on our graphics test system, a Core i7-975 with 6GB of fast DDR, dialed the graphics option down a couple of notches and re-ran our benchmark games at 1280x720 (or 1280x768 for Battle Forge).