Review of the Reviews: ATI Radeon HD 5670

Launched under the promise that “HD gaming starts here”, the ATI Radeon HD 5670 graphics processor make a few boasts from the get go; the promotional notes start by telling us how it offers “best-in-class performance and features, with complete DirectX 11 support and the world’s most advanced graphics, display and memory technologies”.

Overall then, from the promo material they’re not exactly selling themselves short then, but a few weeks on from its release onto the market has ATI really lived up to its word? Previous Radeons such as the HD 5870, HD 5850 and HD 5770 cover a lot of bases when it comes to DX11 but where the 5670 is set to make its mark, as one review notes, is as a low cost DX11 card (around €70 or $100) that, perhaps most importantly considering its mass market audience, does not require an external power connector.

The ATI Radeon HD 5670 - solid for the price if not spectacular overall

As Bit-Tech reveal, “Of course, dropping an external power connector and targeting a lower price point mean that there have had to be some significant cuts when it comes to the core hardware involved. The 40nm GPU, codenamed Redwood (to the 57xx series’ Juniper and the 58xx series’ Cypress) sports a lowly 400 stream processors running at 775MHz (in comparison to the HD 5770’s 800 and the HD 5870’s1,600 stream processors, running at 725MHz and 850MHz respectively), with those 400 comprising just twenty texture units.”

Intimate Tech: Nvidia’s GF100

Over the course of the last couple of months, we’ve been hearing an awful lot from Nvidia. While a lot of that attention has been focused on the upcoming release of Nvidia’s second generation Tegra (for now still tentatively referred to as “Tegra 2”), there’s been more and more focus on the upcoming GF100.

The card itself looks a little bulky...

For now, there are a few fairly vital bits and pieces that we just don’t know about the GF100, but there’s still enough floating around to get a very solid picture indeed of what Nvidia is going with the new hardware. For those who are saying, as Shelton did, “Wait… what happened Fermi?” there’s at least the fact that we’re told the GF-100 is Fermi-derived, so we know it has that history behind it at least.

In Simple Terms:

For now, we don’t know the clock-speed of the GF100, and as a result there’s precious little to know about the power consumption for now, except that it’s already been noted to be a little heavier on power than Nvidia’s own GT200.

Still, before we get bogged down in technical terms, we can help to explain a bit about the GF100 and why there’s so much fuss about it since CES, in terms that just about anyone can understand. It’s relatively simple, but it seems as though very few people have actually tried to describe the GF100 in simple terms.

GF100 was initially just the codename, many have pointed out that it doesn’t stand for GeForce, as some expected, but for Graphics-Fermi. Still, it looks as though the moniker has stuck, and Nvidia could well launch the card as GF100. It was originally meant to be released last year, but rumour has it that due to unusually low yields it’s been bumped back, with many expressing fears that the release date is still looking a little hazy now, despite the fact that Nvidia is saying we’ll see it in March.

Cheer Up Sunshine – It’s the Weekend

Good evening all, with night time managing to stay away until just when we’re leaving work, I think it’s safe enough for us to say that we’re through the best part of Winter now and into the Spring, which is always pleasant. It’s a relatively simple pleasure, but it’s hard to deny.

Anyway, these are some of the bits and pieces that have cheered us up over the course of this week. We think the technically inclined will probably enjoy this piece from ATI that’s meant to show off the fact that any old primate can open up a PC and change a GPU

Aside from that, I suppose this is one of the best things I’ve seen in a very long time… when I complained about the snow in Dublin last week to my sister, she told me that if they got snow down in Kerry she would put me to shame. I took it as a throwaway comment, but it seems as though she was totally serious.

My sister built this... I think that she's now surpassed me in every way 😦

Acer Shows Off 3D Notebook

Acer has taken the opportunity at CES this year to show off two new notebooks, the most interesting of which will likely be the one that manages to be “3D capable.”

TomsHardware is reporting that the two new notebooks boast up to 8GB of RAM, and give users the option of Intel’s Core i7, Core i5, and Core i3 processors, which is curious enough in itself. The devices will be available in either a 15.6” or a 17.3” form factor, with screens resolutions weighing in at 1366×768 and 1600×900 respectively. Indeed, it’s all a little ho-hum (if high-performance) until you get to the graphics arrangement.

Intel Shifts Focus to Mainstream Games

Intel has been focusing on graphics more and more lately, and while the announcement that Larrabee will likely never see the light of day was a bit of a blow, the latest news from the chip giant is more interesting.

Intel’s line of integrated graphics processors has managed to gain enough traction to make Intel (even if only technically) the biggest supplier of graphics hardware on earth. Still, when most gamers talk about Intel’s graphics setups, the terms used aren’t generous, but it seems as though Intel is lining up a new IGP to add some much needed oomph to its line-up.

Build Your Own €500 PC

One of the things we really enjoy doing for the blog is setting someone a fairly unreasonable budget and then asking them to build a PC with it. It’s something that Ryan has come to see happen a little more often than he’d like really, but since a lot of people had asked what was the cheapest someone could reasonably expect to build a PC for, we decided to see how low we could push our resident Welshman.

This machine was built around one of our upgrade kits, click through to see its product page 🙂

I should probably note here that Ryan did put this build together under duress – we did have to keep telling him to stay under budget, no matter how sensible it seemed to go “just a bit” over the €500 mark. If you find yourself with a little extra, don’t hesitate to use this build as a base and flesh out the bits and pieces you find wanting.

We’ll take it from the top now. The first piece of advice was that you can pick up an Upgrade Kit from us that contains the CPU, motherboard and RAM in one pack, which saves some organisational woes.