14 DAY TRIAL // Intended for the mainstream DirectX 11 graphics market, the Radeon HD 5670 is ATI's Redwood GPU-based graphics card with a $100 price point. Like other of AMD's partners, Gigabyte has launched its custom version of the card. The GIGABYTE GV-R567OC-1GI is a factory overclocked version of the reference card that has both striking graphics capabilities and a long product life thanks to its design and special cooling technology.
The card is built with 1GB of 128-bit GDDR5 memory, 400 stream processors and ATI Stream Technology for a combined power of over 620 GigaFLOPS. The card has the aforementioned support for 3D visual effects and dynamic interactivity graphics features provided by DirectX 11, such as Tessellation, HDR Texture Compression, DirectCompute and Multi-threading. These features, along with CrossFireX support, give games a much higher level of realism. Nevertheless, gaming is not the only area where this card will excel.
The card's memory clock is of 4000MHz and the GPU is factory-overclocked to 785 MHz, compared with the stock 775MHz. This overclocking is made possible and reliable by the Ultra Durable 2 design. The blue PCB card uses Ferrite Core chokes, which hold energy much longer than common iron-core chokes, and the GPU's heat generation is reduced by Lower RDS (on) MOSFETs with lower power consumption during the switching process. As such, Gigabyte's cards have a longer product life, a lower power loss and excellent cooling.
The HDMI boasted by the card can connect to TVs with up to 2-channel 48 kHz stereo or 7.1 AC3. The graphics adapter can also handle Blu-ray content, featuring advanced options such as dual-stream, picture in picture (PIP) capabilities, enhanced DVD upscaling and dynamic contrast. Not only that, but with its full support for the advanced features found in the Windows 7 operating system, Gigabyte's cards will be quite suited for HTPCs.
The GIGABYTE GV-R567OC-1GI Radeon HD 5670 is already being listed on newegg with a price tag of $109.99. The company will also be offering the GV-R567D5-512I, which is the same custom HD 5670, but with 512MB of memory.