Manli 5670

Makes overclocking look effortless.

Budget graphics cards, themselves the result of architectural engineers hacking and slashing away at higher-end cards, are typically well-known for their decent performance. However, most people haven't discovered the best part about them; they're generally very overclockable. Increases can typically be seen in a range from 15-25 per cent, netting you extra performance without spending any more money. Manli has now come along and rewritten this range, blowing the top limits of the overclock to 33 per cent!

Starting with the cut-down RV870 'Redwood XT' core, Manli's slapped a custom heatsink on top. It's as basic as they come, being shaped like a flower with the fins of the heatsink spreading outwards, crafted entirely from aluminium. The PCB is dark red, which looks a bit odd with a neon orange fan and blacker-than-your-soul heatsink, but it looks tolerable. Twin Crossfire nipples are present, along with a 16x PCIe slot through which the card draws all its power. A small fan sits in the middle and blows through the fins, passing cool air over the memory chips in the process. Stock clocks are the reference speeds; 775MHz for the core, and 1000MHz for the 1GB of GDDR5 memory chips.

When we fired up our testrig, with the card sitting by itself in the open air without any additional cooling, we didn't expect to get anywhere near the result we did. The core clock just kept increasing, to the point where we set it to a ridiculous 1200MHz just to see if it was actually increasing (turns out it was, and the screen went a lovely shade of purple before the system hard reset). Finally we settled on 1030MHz - a fantastic 255MHz increase on air cooling alone! Representing a 33 per cent increase, this is a great result; the 18 per cent speed increase on the memory chips only added another layer of performance to Manli's cake of epic overclockingness.

Apart from being great fun to overclock, the 5670 doesn't fare too shabbily in games. The 1GB of GDDR5 provides just enough wiggle room to run GRID at a decent clip, though the card isn't powerful enough to run a DX11 game at high resolutions as shown with the Heaven test. Vantage scores are pretty much the same as other 5670 cards, while Crysis flexes its muscles slightly faster thanks to the extra memory space available.

The card idled at a very low 32 degrees Celsius thanks to its ultra-low idle TDP of 14W, rising to 54 degrees under load. Strangely this result is hotter than the reference cooler! The fan seems to be the culprit here, and even though it made a constant 62.2dBA it never seemed to be pushing a huge volume of air. If a better fan were used temps would be even lower, though it didn't seem to hinder overclocking prowess at all.

Unfortunately, you'll be paying a price premium to grab this model with the heatsink, even though it's warmer than the reference design - and much louder too. This places the Manli 5670 in a tricky position. On one hand it's a great overclocker, more than capable of playing older games at a great framerate, and uses very little power. On another it's more expensive for a hotter, noisier heatsink. Ultimately this card is great for those who want to play around with overclocking an inexpensive GPU for the hell of it, or for the gamer who likes the colours (they exist, somewhere), but for most we'd suggest sticking with a standard 1GB 5670.