The evolution of video card technology is a cyclical process. With every new generation of cards you typically see the exciting new features bundled with the high performance, higher priced cards first. After some times has passed you then start to see lower end cards offering some of these same features at a much more mainstream price.

With the Radeon HD5XXX series of cards, we're now experiencing a flood of products from this second wave. A few months ago the excitement was around the 5700, 5800, and 5900 series of cards, and now we are seeing cards from the 5400, 5500, and 5600 series make their way to market.



Sapphire has sent over their new 1GB Radeon HD5670, shown in the promotional image above. This card brings appealing features like onboard HDMI, GDDR5 memory, DirectX 11 support, and ATI's Eyefinity to a compact, low power card priced at just over $100 (US).

Before taking a closer look at the sample provided for review, let's take a look at some published data on this card, as taken from the official product page on the Sapphire website.

Features:

» Microsoft DirectX 11 Support
» ATI Eyefinity Technology, support up to 3 displays.
» ATI Stream technology
» 40nm Process Technology
» Advanced GDDR5 Memory Technology
» Microsoft Windows 7® Support
» ATI CrossFireX™ Technology
» Enhanced Anisotropic Filtering
» Accelerated Video Transcoding
» Display Flexibility
» HDMI 1.3
» PCI Express® 2.1 support
» Dolby® TrueHD and DTSHD Master AudioTM Support
» ATI Avivo™ Technology Enhanced Unified Video Decoder 2 (UVD 2)
» Supports OpenGL 3.2

Specifications:

» SKU Number: 11168-00
» I/O Output: DL-DVI-I, DP, HDMI
» Core clock: 775MHz
» Memory Clock: 4000MHz Effective
» 1024MB / 128-bit GDDR5 memory interface
» PCI-E x16 (PCI-E 2.0) interface
» Dual Slot Fan With Automatic Fan Control
» Eyefinity Support
» Hardware CrossFire
» 11168-00-40R bundled with Arcsoft SIM HD IM