AMD’s Radeon HD 5570: Low Profile, Higher Performance

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.