XFX 5670

Yet another budget oriented card, this time from Atomican favourites, XFX.

ATI's recent launch of graphics cards has definitely been an impressive one - in only a few months, the company's managed to flood the market with its DX11-capable 5xxx series cards, that range from performance that could cauterise wounds, to an affably affordable series of cheaper cards. The 5670 slots in roughly halfway between those two, and is a pretty darn affordable card that should offer some good value for money. At a low price of $128 it definitely hits a certain spot in your wallet, though there isn't any game included in the bundle to sweeten the deal.

The card itself is pretty swanky for what is typically a budget card price, featuring a PCB that has been dipped in black colouring and a single-slot heatsink that matches this colour scheme well. Thoughtfully, the GDDR5 chips on this side of the PCB are cooled by a heatsink that features simple pillars to improve surface area. The expansion bracket offers HDMI, DisplayPort and a single red DVI connector, and all three can be driven at once with Eyefinity.

A teensy fan in the heatsink makes an annoying 56.3dBA of noise, which increases to 57.5dBA at load, with temperatures ranging from 48-65. This is significantly higher than the Sapphire 5670 we looked at last Issue, putting the XFX behind in both noise and temperature performance. The heatsink is to blame here as well, as it is a simple block of metal with small fins.

Even though the cooling wasn't quite as great as the Sapphire card, we still managed to eke out a maximum core clock increase of 15 per cent (to 895Mhz) and memory speed increase of 18 per cent (to 1175MHz). This isn't the best we've seen from a 5670, but it's nowhere near disappointing.

However, even though we could increase the clock of the core, there wasn't much we could do about the core itself. Built on a 40nm process, the Redwood XT core timidly shows off a collection of only 400 shaders, as well as a puny 128-bit memory bus. While technically cheaper to use, this bus is like installing a gigantic funnel at the end of a hose, and expecting a tonne of water to pass through it - you need a bigger hose to deal with the amount of work.

This became most evident in our GRID testing, as it failed to run at a framerate that would allow us into the actual test. Only 512MB of memory is partly to blame, but the memory bus also gets in the way. This is definitely a poor choice for ultra-resolution gaming, though for the price you wouldn't expect it to be a dream. Interestingly we found that Crysis performance was only slightly hindered by an average of half a frame compared to a 5670 with twice the memory, and both 3DMark programs didn't seem to miss the additional memory.

If you're still running games on a 17 or 19in monitor then this card will do well at medium settings, but don't expect big-screen high-setting performance from this beastie. There's nothing past a manual and driver disc included in the packaging, nor does this model support Crossfire if you want to add another down the track. The XFX version of the 5670 is an affordable entry into DX11, and with performance comparably higher than a GT240 it's one of the best midrange cards that money can buy.