ATI HD 5570 Review - PAGE 2

Impressions

The HD 5570 is in the same size class of last week's HD 5450: size small. At about six and half inches long, and a half-card height, it will be able to fit into many places that a full sized card cannot. With not a lot of PCB real estate, the board's components have limited room to be arranged -- but things don't look too crammed. As often is the case with the higher-end cards, board partners will get to work tweaking and changing up the reference design that we are seeing today. It'll be interesting to see if anything truly radical turns up.

The cooler featured here is a step up from the HD 5450's passive, curved heatsink. This time around we have a active system, with a seven vane 40mm fan. This fan is generally fairly quiet as it pushes air along a fin inches of heat fins. The base plat spans roughly half of the card, cooling the GPU, but is not attached to the memory chips. Though the fan is small, the noise output could be smaller -- when the GPU gets really pushed, you'll hear a bit of a whir coming from this little card.

The HD 5570 beside last week's HD 5450

On the bracket, we have a good selection of display outputs here, including a VGA port, a DVI port, and a DisplayPort. It is nice to have this much flexibility. Being a member of the HD 5000 series, the HD 5570 features Eyefinity tech, which allows for up to three displays to be used at any one given time. Powering three displays from a video card that retails for about $80 at launch is a nice feature to have indeed.

Size comparison between the HD 5450, HD 5570, HD 5670, HD 5770, and the mondo HD 5970

Specifications

From the design of the GPU, the HD 5570 seems to have more in common with the HD 5670 than it does the HD 5450. We are looking at much the same design as the GPU powering the HD 5670, but just in a 'lighter' configuration. This configuration features 400 stream processors, 8 ROPs, and 20 texture units. The GPU itself is 40nm part, like all recent ATI GPUs, and features an surprisingly high (for a lower end video card) 627 million transistors crammed in there.

When trying to guess some of the performance figures for this video card, there are two very important factors that must be considered. First off, the HD 5570 has a 128-bit memory interface. Last weeks HD 5450 had a 64-bit memory interface, and it had it work cut out for it when it came to gaming, with that amount of limited possible bandwidth. The second important factor here is that the HD 5570 uses GDDR3 memory -- in this case, 1GB of it. On the cards such as the HD 5670 and above, GDDR5 has become the defacto tool in ATI's arsenal to bring performance up a notch. The HD 5570 is more cost effective solution, so slower GDDR3 is employed here. Between these two factors, it'll be interesting to see if the performance of this card is closer to the mid-range HD 5670 part, or the entry-level HD 5450.

Overclocking

Like other recent ATI video cards, the options to overclock the HD 5570 are fairly limited by the Catalyst Control Center. Perhaps too many customers have been frying out their card's memory, as there have been those reports of the "gray screen" -- regardless of the reason, the max overclock allowable by the CCC is 50 MHz for the memory, and 50 MHz for for the core clock. We experienced no problems at all with many hours of looping benchmarks with these max overclocks set, and the fan running at 100%. We think for many looking for every little bit they can get out of the inexpensive HD 5570, they'll want to get this extra performance boost.

We expect that some third-party overclocking tools will soon be available that will be able to push the HD 5570 further. With the 400 stream processors, there should be some good overclocking headroom available to push things significantly further.