ATI’s latest card has got wood.
Graphics card manufacturers, such as Sapphire, have never designed the cores that run inside their products. Instead, this task is left up to the current two largest designers of processing cores; ATI and NVIDIA. ATI have been first out of the gate with DirectX11 cores, and their top-end design has brought a lot of performance improvements and architecture changes to the whole range of cards. Until now we've only seen the higher-end performance offerings, but the newest cores have finally trickled down to the mainstream market - shown here in the form of the 5670.
It's still based around the R870 core that debuted late last year, but the derivative here is codenamed Redwood. Sporting only 627 million transistors and 400 shader units (compared to 2.15 billion and 1600 units), this core is still manufactured on a 40nm process and is clearly aimed at those on a budget. While it retains all the DX11 features that are inherent in the design of the core, clock speeds move along at a reduced pace of 775MHz. Memory speeds are also affected by the nature of this cut-down core, with a speed of 1000MHz matching a 128-bit memory bus. There's a very workable total of 1GB GDDR5 memory here to play with, which should be plenty for any game.
Most noticeable about the card's form factor is the limited length of the card, coming in at only slightly longer than the PCIe slot that it resides in. This is due in part to the low power consumption of the card at load hitting a 61W ceiling; below the 75W maximum that can be drawn through the PCIe slot. Therefore there isn't a need for an external 6-pin power connector, nor any of the power delivery components that usually reside around that area, reducing the amount of PCB needed significantly. This low power consumption also means that the heatsink can be relatively small, and Sapphire have chosen a simple all-aluminium design from Arctic Cooling to get the job done. It's large enough to push the form factor into dual-slot territory, but temperatures range from 38-45 degrees between idle and load with a very low 47.3-49.9dBA noise generation. In fact this is so low that it's almost unnoticeable from any decent distance away, so you won't notice it once inside a case environment.
It's got two Crossfire nipples along the top of the card (though if you're going to run two of these it makes more sense to simply buy a faster card at the outset), and three digital outputs on the expansion bracket for up to three screens at once. Overclocking wasn't actually that limited, with a boost of 16 per cent on the core (to 900MHz) and 23 per cent for memory speeds (to 1226MHz). An unfortunate downside to the cooling and PCB design meant that while four of the eight GDDR5 chips sat underneath the fan, four of them were on the rear of the PCB - these became blisteringly hot when overclocked and under load, and the PCB itself became uncomfortably warm.
Performance in games at high resolutions was disappointing compared to higher-end cards, but not surprising considering the market. 3DMark benchmarks showed the speed of the card remained slightly higher than a GT240, but the 1GB of included memory in Sapphire's version bumps the price up quite high. It's still a nice choice for low-powered gaming rigs or if your budget only stretches that far, but performance junkies will need to search elsewhere for their next high.
Issue: 137 | June, 2012