ATI Radeon HD 5570 review

We experienced a strange sense of déjà vu when we first came across ATI’s Radeon HD 5570. It shares the same diminutive PCB as ATI’s recently released HD 5450 media card – but a quick look at its specifications shows it has more in common with the mid-range HD 5670.

It uses the same "Redwood" core as that card, and so the same number of stream processors at 400. In some ways it's superior, with double the RAM at 1,024MB, but in others it lags behind, using only GDDR3 to the HD 5670's GDDR5, and a slightly slower core clock speed at 650MHz to the HD 5670's 725MHz.

That's doesn't hold it back, though, and the card put in a very impressive showing in our tests. As expected, performance in the Low-quality Crysis test was good at 116fps, and it coped well with the Medium-quality test too, returning a perfectly playable 45fps. That's very good, but not as fast as its main rival, which returned a frame rate 13fps faster. This trend continued in the High quality Crysis test, the HD 5570 scoring 18fps, to the HD 5670's 25fps.

In our World in Conflict tests the card averaged 134fps and 74fps at low and medium-quality settings respectively, and produced a near-playable score of 24fps at high quality settings, suggesting that modern games aren’t beyond the reach of the HD 5570 as long as you tone down some of the more intensive graphical options.

It proved adept with media files, the GPU needing only 20% of its power to decode 1080p Blu-ray flawlessly. And that’s not the end of the HD 5570’s charms, either. With such a small PCB it’ll fit into the most cramped cases and its small fan doesn't make a lot of noise either. The HD 5570 is also frugal: our test rig’s peak power consumption of 169W was 5W lower than that required by the HD 5670.

The 5570 has one big problem, however, and that's the price. Although its specification and slower performance suggest it sits below the HD 5670 in ATI's line-up, it'll cost you about the same. And when that card offers more grunt, there’s little reason to choose the HD 5570 instead.

Author: Mike Jennings