AMD Radeon HD 5670 1 GB

With the Radeon HD 5670, ATI is attacking the occasional player segment, those looking to set themselves up at under the £80 mark. It has DirectX 11 compatibility, but how does the card do in gaming? Is it powerful enough to run the latest 3D titles or not?

Size, noise and heat generation

At 16.8 cm long and weighing in at 230 grammes, the 5670 is a featherweight model. The cooling system is very flat and the card only takes up one PCI slot. However this cooler has two disadvantages.

Firstly, hot air is not funnelled out of the casing but remains inside. Secondly the fan is not one of the quietest. We took a reading of 43.1 dB(A) in idle, which translates to a constant sound that, though not noisy enough to be annoying, is present. In load, it becomes more insistent and tends to become more shrill (51.4 dB(A)). We’ve seen louder but we’ve seen quieter too.

In terms of heat, the card’s pretty standard for the Radeon HD 5000 range: 42°C at idle and 84°C when in intense 3D load.

Energy consumption

First of all, note that the card doesn’t require the use of a PCI-Express power cable. The 75 W from the PCI-Express connector are enough. You can see why the card consumes so little.

At idle, first of all, it's in keeping with the excellent performance of the rest of the Radeon HD 5000 series with a reading of 80 W. In load, this figure climbs to 172 W, which is a pretty good showing. Note that these readings are for the whole system and not just the graphics card.

Gaming performance

This card hasn’t been designed for regular gamers or those who want to activate all graphics settings in games. It’s best to keep it for configurations for which gaming is secondary and which use a low resolution screen.


When you look at the results you can see that you’ll have trouble running the games in our test protocol on this model, at least at reasonable settings. You can’t activate all the graphics options on an averagely demanding title such as Fallout 3 on which it managed 43 frames per second on average (frequent slowdowns) at 1280 x 1024.

What this means is that you can run recent titles on the Radeon HD 5670 but you need a low res screeen and won’t be able to activate many of the graphics options. Your gaming experience will be less visually impressive than with a higher performance card that won’t necessarily cost a great deal more.