Turn off the Ad Banner   

To print: Select File and then Print from your browser's menu.

    -----------------------------------------------

     This story was printed from CdrInfo.com,

     located at http://www.cdrinfo.com.

    -----------------------------------------------

Appeared on: Thursday, March 18, 2010
Gigabyte HD5670 OC

1. About the GIGABYTE GV-R567OC-1G

ATI's 5xxx series of graphics cards has brought the DX11 as well as other technologies to the mainstream market. Affordably priced - and without any serious competition from Nvidia at least so far - the products have gained a market share. The Gigabyte HD5670OC is built on the ATI Radeon HD 5600 Series of GPUs, which utilizes the 627 million transistors on 40nm fabrication process and comes with GDDR5 memory on-board. The GIGABYTE GV-R567OC-1GI supports DirectX 11, ATI Stream technology, ATI CrossFireX multi-GPU, UVD 2 and PowerPlay technologies. GIGABYTE's GV-R5600 graphics cards are also featuring Gigabyte's Ultra Durable 2 technology and come with an HDMI port for HD gaming and Blu-ray movie playback.


The GIGABYTE GV-R567OC-1GI features ATI's 2nd Generation TeraScale graphics engine, boasting the power of more than 620 GigaFLOPS with 400 stream processors. With 1GB of GDDR5 memory, the GV-R567OC-1GI provides twice the data per pin of GDDR3 memory at the same clock speeds. Utilizing ATI Stream Technology, end-user can unleash the parallel processing power of GPU for physics, artificial intelligence, stream computing and ray tracing calculations, and tackle demanding tasks like video transcoding at high speeds.


The GIGABYTE GV-R5600 Series support the interactive and efficient GPU-accelerated environment of Microsoft's Windows 7 operating system. A native HDMI output is delivering fully integrated support for deep color and 7.1 digital surround sounds. In addition, they are featured on golden plated HDMI connector to fulfill users’ high definition audio and video needs simply through one cable.


The GIGABYTE GV-R5600 Series also implement GIGABYTE Ultra Durable 2 boards that guarantee efficient cooling, lowest power loss, and longer product life. Lower RDS (on) MOSFETs have lower power consumption during the switching process, resulting in less heat generated by the GPU. Ferrite Core chokes hold energy much longer than common iron-core chokes and lower ESR Solid Capacitors contribute to a more stable and reliable operation.

- Retail package

The Gigabyte HD5670 OC (GV-R567OC-1GI) comes in a small-sized retail box with a futuristic design and many logos indicating the product's main features. At the time this article was written, we found the product listed online for around ~€94 (including VAT) - well positioned against Nvidia's latest GT240 graphics cards..

In the box we found the graphics card packaged into an anti-static bag, installation instructions, a printed manual and a driver CD-ROM:

The Gigabyte HD5670 OC has relatively small dimensions (18 x11 cm) and it is equipped Gigabyte's own cooling solution, skipping ATI's default GPU cooler:

The card requires at least a 450 Watt PSU and not any external power besides the PCI-E:

 

The provided outputs include an HDMI port, a D-Sub15 port and a DVI-D port. Although the outputs panel of the card is slim, the installed cooler increases the overall volume of the card. As a result, we have to do with a 2-slot card here.

The product also supports AMD's Eyefinity Technology, which allows up to three monitors to be installed and therefore increase the visual experience.. More information can be found over here.

According to the GPU-Z utility, the card's GPU core runs at 850MHz and its memory is clocked at 1100MHz. Remember that the specific graphics card is pre-overclocked, meaning that it should perform better than ATI's reference HD5670 boards:

2. How we test
- PC Setup

All the tests conducted under the same testbed and of course the same graphics driver revision. We used many games and applications to evaluate the performance of each graphics card:

DirectX 9

DirectX10

3. Testbed DX9, DX10
- Testbed DirectX9

For all the tests we used the default settings of the 3DMark05 software as you can see below:

Again we left all the settings to default:

- Testbed DirectX10

We used the three built- in benchmarks to test the performance of each graphics card. We measured the performances at various resolutions using the "Performance" and up to the "Extreme" settings.

We used the built-in benchmark with all the graphics detail settings maxed out.

We used the hocbench Crysis benchmark tool at the resolutions of 1280x1024, 1680x1050 and finally 1920x1200. We run the benchmark software with "High" and "Very High" details enabled in order to identify the optimum settings for a decent game play.

We used the FRAMEBuffer benchmark tool at 1280x1024, 1680x1050 and finally at 1920x1200. All the possible quality levels were set in order to get an idea of what each graphics card can offer.

We used the built-in benchmarking utility and maxed out all visual details, under both DX9/DX10 and settings up to 16x AA/16x AF.

4. FutureMark Hall Of Fame

The Futuremark benchmarks have been highly discussed among gamers and reviewers. For your information we post the results from 3DMark 05, 3DMark 06 and of course the latest 3DMark Vantage benchmarking software, which give you a rough idea of the performance of each graphics card.

According to the results, the Gigabyte HD5670 OC is positioned somewhere in the middle of the following table with a score of 15839 - not bad at all:

The Gigabyte HD5670 OC scores higher than the Nvidia GT240-based graphic cards, as you can see below in the results at the 3DMark 06 benchmark:

The 3DMark Vantage offers a a clearer view of the card's performance at various resolutions. This time the Gigabyte HD5670 OC gave almost the same performance with the the Gainward GT240. Both AMD's previous generation HD4770 as well as the newer HD5770 series are much faster regardless the selected resolution:

5. Crysis Warhead (DirectX9, DirectX10), S.T.A.L.K.E.R: Call Of Pripyat Benchmark
- Crysis Warhead (DirectX9, DirectX10)

Compared to the original game, 'Crysis Warhead' features many visual improvements in both DirectX9 and DirectX10 rendering modes. Below are the test results we wrote down for various resolutions with the anti-aliasing feature disabled.

The Gigabyte HD5670 OC is powerful enough (FPS >30) to handle the specific game title, as long as you don't select anything higher than the ' Mainstream' quality settings. A faster card will be required in order to enjoy playing at the 'Gamer' and 'Enthusiast' quality levels:

Below see a graphical comparison of the DX9 performance of various cards at different resolutions. The main competitors of this test, the Gigabyte HD5670 OC and the Gainward GT 240, will perform equally at 1280 x 1024. However, the Gigabyte HD5670 OC took a small lead as we increased the resolution:

Under the DX10 shaders, any differences in the performance between the GT20 and HD5670 are ironed out, especially as the resolutions increases:

- S.T.A.L.K.E.R: Call Of Pripyat Benchmark

The "Call of Pripyat" benchmark is freely available for everyone in order to have an idea of the visuals of the upcoming game and also test your system with the game and share your score online with other users. We used the highest detail settings under DX10 and DX11 and the resolution of 1920x1200.

Starting with the DX10, the results are very good for the 'Day', 'Night' and 'Rain' scenarios but rather low at the 'SunShaft' preset. Reducing the visual quality and the resolution could give you some more FPS here.

The built-in benchmark showed a 34.2FPS performance under the 'Day' settings, 33.1FPS under the 'Night', 35.4FPS under the 'Rain' and just 14.3FPS under the 'Sunshafts' test:

Using the DX11 shaders did not make any difference and the performance was the same as we previously saw:

6. Company Of Heroes v1.71 (DirectX 10)

Company Of Heroes is a popular action/strategy game with many fans around the world. The game it was the first ever to utilize the DirectX10 and the game physics are very impressive. We maxed out all the visual details and the built-in benchmark provided the in-game FPS for each card.

The Gigabyte HD5670 OC didn't perform very well here, giving rather FPS in the game's benchmark. The relatively poor performance could be attributed to an non-optimized graphics driver for the specific game:

7. Far Cry 2 (DirectX 9/10), Left4Dead (DirectX 9), StreetFighter IV (DirectX 9)

- Far Cry 2 (DirectX 9/10)

Far Cry 2 is one of the hottest game titles right now. The game supports both DirectX 9 and DirectX10 and its graphics engine is much lighter than the one used by the "Crysis" game title. As a result, most of the graphics cards graphic cards perform very well even at 1920x1200 with 16xAA/16xAF enabled.

Compared with the Gainward GT 240 graphics card, the Gigabyte HD5670 OC is faster under DX9 the shaders and will give you up to 10FPS more. Of course, as the resolution increases, these differences are smaller.

The Gigabyte HD5670 OC continued to be stronger than the Gainward GT 240 under DX10 shaders and the 'Ultra high' quality settings at 1920 x 1200:

 

- Left4Dead (DirectX 9)

With the Left4Dead gaming title we used a custom timedemo and measured the performance of the graphics card using the the embedded console, for resolutions up to 1920x1200 with 16xAF enabled. and maximized all visual settings

The Gigabyte HD5670 OC card performed similarly to the Gainward GT240 solution:

 

- StreetFighter IV (DirectX 9)

Here are two more benchmarks from the Streetfighter IV and the Unigine benchmark demonstrating the performance of the Gigabyte HD5670 OC:

8. Overclocking, final words

- Overclocking

In order to overclock the card you need to enable the 'ATI Overdrive' function under the Catalyst Control Center. The 'Auto tune' function will test the limits of the graphics card for a stable operation. We should note here that most of the times, the 'Auto tune' function will give you lower clocks than you might get by manually testing the card's limits.

As you can see in the screenshots below, the GPU core is overclocked to its limits (850MHz) . The best you can do here is to get some extra 50MHz for the memory clock, reaching the 1050MHz:

- Summary

The Gigabyte HD5670 OC is a good example of a fast graphics card found for less than €100. Gigabyte's smart factory overclocking was enough to make the card look it's main competitor - Nvidia's GT 240 - directly to the eyes. The Gigabyte HD5670 OC gave the same performance with the GT240 in most of the games/benchmarks we tested, with some slight differences noted depending on the the game and probably the graphics driver we used.

What's more, the HD5670 OC supports DX11. This would allow you to enjoy the new Dirt 2 game even at 1920 x 1200, although you will have to set the quality settings to 'Low':

The HD5760 series also supports ATI's Eyefinity technology, offering 'wrap around' multi-display capabilities - very useful for first-person shooter gamers. The Gigabyte HD5670 OC card also offers hardware acceleration for video playback and retails for less than €100, making it a great buy for users who need support for DirectX 11 games.

On the other hand, don't expect much from the overclocking capabilities of the card, since Gigabyte has already done it for you.

The Gigabyte HD5670 OC is a DX11 product that is affordable, comes with a great feature set, and it remains competitive performance wise. This card really deserves your attention if you can't afford having the double-priced HD5770 series, which would offer higher frame rates at all resolutions.



Home | News | All News | Reviews | Articles | Guides | Download | Expert Area | Forum | Site Info
Site best viewed at 1024x768+ - CDRINFO.COM 1998-2024 - All rights reserved -
Privacy policy - Contact Us .