14 DAY TRIAL // Passively cooled graphics cards have been quire scarce in the last couple on months since most of the GPUs launched lately have been using high performance architectures that require complex cooling solutions, but XFX is taking a break from this trend as it decided to release a passive Radeon HD 5670.
The Radeon HD 5670 was released more than an year ago by AMD, but the low power consumption of the Redwood chip on which this is based makes it a prime candidate for building a passive video card.
This becomes clear when taking a look at the cooling solution employed by XFX for its graphics card, as this is basically just an aluminum heatsink that doesn't feature any sort of heatpipes of active fans.
In addition, the whole cooling setup occupies only a single PCI slot, so the card can be installed inside compact cases where space is at a premium.
As far as its specifications go, XFX' creation is clocked at 775MHz and the card features 1GB of DDR3 memory that is clocked at 1600MHz.
This is connected to the GPU via a 128-bit memory interface and the core features 400 stream processors, 20 texturing units as well as 8 ROP units.
In addition, the card also features AMD's Unified Video Decoder 2 technology that provides hardware acceleration for Full HD content as well as other video formats.
As far as the available video outputs are concerned, XFX decided to pair the card with DVI, VGA and HDMI connectors, a more-than-OK arrangement considering the limited space available. Nonetheless, it would have been nice if XFX had swapped the VGA output with a DisplayPort connector.
Pricing for the passively cooled XFX Radeon HD 5670 card has been established at 65 Euros, which translates into approximately $91. (via Donanim Haber)