AMD’s Radeon HD 5570: Low Profile, Higher Performance
by Ryan Smith on February 9, 2010 12:00 AM EST- Posted in
- GPUs
Conclusion
With AMD's positioning of the Radeon HD 5570 in the marketplace, you can get a few very different outcomes depending on what you’re looking for. As a video-only HTPC card, it’s no better than the 5450 in features, while it’s worse in terms of power consumption and noise. Based on our research the 5570 isn’t the HTPC über card we were expecting it to be, so if you can bear the limitations of the 5450, that’s going to be the better card. Otherwise the 5670 is the most capable choice out there. The 5570 does nothing better than either of those two cards when it comes to HTPC use.
Meanwhile if we take a look at overall performance, the 5570 doesn’t fare much better. The move from GDDR5 to DDR3 has a significant impact on the performance of the Redwood GPU in most cases, bringing the 5570 well below the 5670 and similar cards. The lower-end of the 5000 series has been consistently overpriced when it comes to overall performance, and the 5570 is no different. The GDDR3 9600GT can be found for around the same price point, and is anywhere between just as fast as the 5570 to completely clobbering it. The 5570 can’t compete amidst that much of a memory bandwidth gap. If you can fit a full-sized card, you can do much better than the 5570 when it comes solely to performance; the 9600GT and the GT 240 are both much more capable cards for the $80-$85 price tag.
Last, but certainly not least however, is the area the 5570 excels at: low-profile cards. The low-profile market is basically dominated by bottom-tier cards such as the GeForce 210, Radeon 4350, Radeon 5450, and of course a number of even older cards. The 5570 is faster than every single one of them, usually by a factor of 2-3x. Compared to the 5450 in particular, it fits in the same form factor and offers around 3x the performance for only $25 more. The use of Redwood as opposed to Cedar does mean it consumes more power and generates more heat, but this should be a bearable tradeoff for the significant performance improvement in most low-profile cases.
The only catch we would add to that is that while the 5570 is going to be the fastest mass-market card, technically speaking it’s not the fastest low-profile card ever made. We’ve seen a low-profile 9800GT from Sparkle that should make quick work of the 5570, but at 2x the power draw of the 5570, it’s a specialty card that would only work in a limited number of well ventilated low-profile cases. The 5570 in comparison is going to be the fastest low-profile card on mass-market.
With that out of the way however, there’s not a whole lot else we can say. By being a low-profile card the 5570 is a more compelling second-tier card to the 5670 than the 4650 was to the 4670, but otherwise it brings with it all the pitfalls of trying to shave down the price of an already decently cheap card. Unless you need a low-profile card or a card that specifically meets the 5570’s power characteristics, you’re going to be better off looking at other cards, particularly if you can swing a little more money for something like the Radeon 4850 while it’s still available.
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YogiBeer - Tuesday, March 16, 2010 - link
Hey i'm a bit of an end user so dont troll on me for asking this but ive got an Hp s5216f system the graphics card i got with it is shovel ware and i need one that can play games like modern warfare 2 and the like...will this do the trick and if not what will.......... thanx for the help............ Cheers matesmAJORD - Friday, April 2, 2010 - link
I got one of these to play Battlefield Bad company 2 on a little ITX system.I OCd it to 720 core 1080 mem leaving the fan at AUTO.
at 1920x1080 Med detail settings, DX10, no AA 2xAF it's quite "playable" 25-mid 30 FPS and looks OK to be honest for such such a low power card. which is exactly what I was hoping.
Saying that I really wish they were equiped with downclocked DDR5! and the same 42w TDP. that would have been incredible bang / watt and size! disapointing AMD :(
avi1956 - Sunday, February 28, 2010 - link
I purchased HIS 5570 HD 1GB video card from Newegg on Feb 15. When playing games after 5 to 15 mins of play I get crackling sound and frame rate degradation. The problem gets worse till the frame rate drop becomes progressively worse and noise continues. Also the OS slows down (mouse slow down). The only way to recover is to reboot. I have gateway SX2802-01 quad core Q8300 with 4 meg ram and windows 7 64 bit and latest catalyst driver dated 2/17/10 from ati.com. I have sent a belarc trouble report to ati and HIS and awaiting their feedback. Not sure if this is a hardware or software problem.PhantomKnight - Tuesday, February 23, 2010 - link
Thank you for a very informative article. It clears a lot up. I'm interested because I'm sick of using old hot noisy hardware.I don't normally like typo posts, but when it confuses, it's a problem.
"As with Sapphire’s 5450, their 5770 comes in a surprisingly large box. Inside is the card, a low-profile bracket, drivers, an installation guide, and Arcsoft’s SimHD video conferencing plugin."
While I'd love to see a 5770 utalise a low profile, I doubt it will happen.
office boy - Wednesday, February 10, 2010 - link
With the NV GT cards supporting 8 channel LPCM is ATI's support of Bitstreaming that important? Decoding in the PC vs in the receiver.Isn't the outcome is the same? Uncompressed 7.1?
wlee15 - Wednesday, February 10, 2010 - link
The GT and older ATI cards don't support the Protected audio path which means that any soundtracks higher than 16-bit 48 khz are downsampled to 16-bit 48 khz.Also the HD 5570 should support support Vector Adaptive with newer drivers.
http://forum.beyond3d.com/showpost.php?p=1392217&a...">http://forum.beyond3d.com/showpost.php?p=1392217&a...
falacy - Wednesday, February 10, 2010 - link
My upgrade process over the last several years has led me to the following system, which I am very happy with in terms performance for the things I actually do (World of Warcraft, media encoding, productivity applications, music production). However, I have a couple "issues" that I'd like to resolve.eVGA 8600GT 256MB video
1600x900 resolution
Asus P5K-VM motherboard
Q8200 2.33GHz CPU
6GB 667MHz RAM
Seagate 7200RPM 16MB Cache HD
The thermal performance of my case, a modified AT server tower cira 1991, is great and the 8600GT runs at 50c idle 73c avg load, which compairs nicely to the 5570. Ultimately, I'd like a fanless card that can do what I do now.
In WoW I can run at full (4x AA and 8x AF in driver) settings as long as I turn Shadow Detail all the way down to Min. However, any time there is a lot fog or spell detail, I end up with a nice 5FPS picture show. Turning spell detail to half resolves that.
Do you think the 5570, when someone creates a fanless version, would solve those two issues and perform a little better than the 8600GT with its whopping 256MB of slow RAM?
MrSpadge - Tuesday, February 9, 2010 - link
I've been reading this sentence in GPU reviews since some time now:[quote]The GT 240 is the biggest winner here, beating even the 5570. However this is likely due to differences in how AMD and NVIDIA throttle their cards under FurMark.[/quote]
Doesn't it bother you to basically say "Well, half of all these measurements are probably wrong, but we'll show them as a comparison anyway"? Either rename the FurMark.exe or use a different test. 3DCenter.org have shown that Bioshock is very demanding and reaches the highest real world power usage ever recorded in a game (still lower than FurMark, of course).
Moizy - Tuesday, February 9, 2010 - link
Now that the 5450 and 5570 are out, and nVidia won't have replacements for the 210 and 220 for a while, can we have a HTPC card showdown article? I noticed that the GT 220 review didn't analyze the video quality quite like the 5450 and 5570 reviews have, so I'm wondering how they all compare.Could we have a showdown that analyzes these newer HTPC cards for audio and video capabilities, and maybe throw in the new Intel HD graphics? Would be very educational for those of us that want a good HTPC card but don't care about gaming.
Ryan Smith - Tuesday, February 9, 2010 - link
If you check the 5450 article, I actually do have a shot of the GT 220 in there. It actually does rather well at the VA test, but going NVIDIA means you have to give up some degree of post-processing control, along with bitstreaming audio.