HD 6570 & HD6670 Review

These new products are a natural evolution of the Radeon HD 5570 and 5670, two very important cards in the sub-$100 graphics card market. For some time, we’ve recognized the Radeon HD 5570 as a realistic ~$65 starting point for budget buyers looking for respectable gaming hardware, and the ~$80 Radeon HD 5670 holds the distinction of being the most powerful reference design that doesn’t require a dedicated PCIe power cable.

To this point, most of the Radeon HD 6000-series cards employ a subtle (but notable) architectural tuning from the 5000-series days, so we expect these new models to be closely related to their predecessors. Let’s see how the Turks GPU stacks up:





This is another offspring of the Barts graphics processor introduced in the Radeon HD 6800 series, which itself was an evolution of Cypress. This one is scaled down to six SIMD engines, though. Each engine is associated with four texture units and is composed of 16 thread processors, with five stream processing units (ALUs) per thread processor. In the case of Turks, that makes for a grand total of 24 texture units and 480 ALUs. Two 64-bit memory controllers deliver an aggregate 128-bit memory interface, and both render back-ends host four color ROPs, totaling eight.





Both of the reference samples that AMD supplied are half-height models, ideal for HTPC applications. At a casual glance, you wouldn’t be able to tell the Radeon HD 6570 apart from the Radeon HD 6450, despite the huge difference in performance potential. AMD's Radeon HD 6670 stands apart from its peer with a much larger cooler, despite the same 6½” x 3” PCB. It should be noted that this cooler manages to fit within the space designated for a single PCIe slot.



The Radeon HD 6670 performs a little better than AMD's 5670, and the GDDR5-equipped 6570 performs a little worse.

Next up is the new Radeon HD 6570. Equipped with GDDR5, it’s not quite as fast as the Radeon HD 5670. However, its $79 MSRP is very similar to the 5670’s online retail pricing. You could argue that the Radeon HD 6570 GDDR5 has better overclocking potential, but we can't be sure until we get our hands on actual retail samples, rather than cherry-picked reference cards. In any case, the older Radeon HD 5670 remains a viable option at $80. It's certainly not obsolete yet.



Over time, the street price of AMD's Radeon HD 6670 will go down to the $80 level where it belongs, replacing the Radeon HD 5670. Remember, its MSRP was $99 at launch, too.


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