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Like the Radeon HD 5450, the Radeon HD 5570 also features a low-profile design, making it an ideal HTPC graphics card. The card is said to consume just 43 watts of power under load, which is a fraction of the 61 watts needed to power the Radeon HD 5670 or the 108 watts on the Radeon HD 5770.   A big plus about the Radeon HD 5570 consuming so little power is that it doesn't require an external power source. The PCI Express bus alone is capable of delivering enough current to this card. The Radeon HD 5570 also generates very little heat and as such AMD has been able to get away with using a small single slot cooler. The sample we received from AMD used a tiny 45mm fan that cools a small 95mm x 55mm copper heatsink. It is worth noting that the use of a copper heatsink makes this graphics card surprisingly heavy.  Compared to the Radeon HD 5670, which measures 17cm, the Radeon HD 5570 is actually the same length. This is also the same as the GeForce GT 240 and should fit in any case that can support a mATX motherboard. The Radeon HD 5570 uses a low-profile design measuring just 5.5cm tall, whereas a typical graphics card is 9.5cm tall.  The core configuration of the Radeon HD 5570 includes 400 SPUs, 16 TAUs (Texture Address Units) and 8 ROPs (Rasterization Operator Units). That's considerably less than other cards in the series, though it is similar to that of the older Radeon HD 4670.  AMD has stuck with a 128-bit memory bus for the Radeon HD 5570, which allows for a relatively low bandwidth of just 28.8GB/s. Most variants of the Radeon HD 4670 support a memory bandwidth of at least 28.8GB/s, while the Radeon HD 4770 features a much more impressive bandwidth of 51.2GB/s.  Core clock speed is set at 650 MHz, which should be good for 520 gigaflops of raw computing power, while GDDR3 memory operates at 900MHz. The Radeon HD 5570 can come configured with either 512MB or 1GB of memory -- the sample we are reviewing today features 1GB. As with all low-end graphics cards we highly recommend you purchase the lowest memory capacity model possible. This is because they are cheaper and do not sacrifice much if any performance. There are no bridge connectors on the Radeon HD 5570, but it's still possible to link two of these graphics cards through internal CrossFireX.  The Radeon HD 5570 retains Eyefinity support, so if this is the feature you are looking for on a budget card then it makes the Radeon HD 5570 an ideal choice. Like its higher-end variants in the 5000 series, you can hook up to three high resolution monitors up to 2560x1600. However our sample version was limited to 1920x1200 as the maximum resolution across three monitors due to its inclusion of a VGA port. |
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