AMD’s Radeon HD 6670 & Radeon HD 6570: Two’s Company, Sub-$100’s A Crowd
by Ryan Smith on April 19, 2011 12:01 AM ESTMeet The Radeon HD 6670 & Radeon HD 6570
With the Redwood cards (5670 & 5570), we saw two distinct reference designs even though both used the same GPU. The 5670 was a full-profile card while the 5570 was a low-profile card intended to fill a higher performance low-profile niche. With the Turks cards however, this kind of stratification is gone.
Look closely and you'll see the ATI logo. AMD is using spare 5570 coolers for the 6570 reference design, which means these coolers predate the AMD rebranding. Retail cards won't be like this, however.
Instead both reference cards are low-profile cards. The PCB for both cards is quite similar, but not identical. In practice with only a 6W difference between the two cards, we can’t imagine too many partners will roll different PCBs for the cards. The difference between the two cards really comes down to the cooler used – the 6570 uses the same AMD reference cooler we’ve seen on the 5570 and 6450 (it is in fact a spare 5570 cooler), while the 6670 uses a new low-profile double-wide cooler. This is how AMD managed to get the 6670 out as a low-profile card as opposed to a full-profile card like the 5670: it’s shorter, but it’s wider.
Our 6670 is equipped with 4 2Gb 5GHz Hynix GDDR5 memory modules. This marks the first time we’ve seen 2Gb GDDR5 on anything other than a high-end card, which is a good sign that we should expect to see more cards using 2Gb GDDR5 in the near future. Both the 6670 and 6570 measure 6.61” long, the same length for that matter as the 6450.
Display connectivity is the same as with other AMD low-profile cards. On the PCB are a single DVI-DL port and a DP 1.2 port, while on the bracket is a VGA port attached with a ribbon cable. With partner cards we’d expect a number of cards to drop the DP1.2 port for an HDMI 1.4 port on both cards. But on that note, one thing we’re still trying to get confirmation on from AMD is whether Turks can drive more than one DVI-type display at once. We have no specific reason to believe this, but Barts did drop a DVI-DL port for a DVI-SL port, so if anyone is going to drop down to supporting a single DVI-type display at once, it’s AMD. In any case through the magic of DP1.2 MST hubs, the 6670 can drive four displays. Meanwhile the 6570 can drive three displays.
As was the case with the 6450, AMD’s reference design is only for engineering and sampling purposes – it’s not going to be used in retail cards. We don’t have any pictures of retail cards as of press time, but we’d expect 6670 and 6570 designs to resemble 5570 designs with a larger cooler more suitable for Turks. As such our temperature/noise results are a decent approximation of the cards that will be on the market, but they won’t match any specific retail cards.
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ClagMaster - Tuesday, April 19, 2011 - link
The HD6670 is a nice upgrade for a 9600GT, both of which are 65W cards.I beleive, based on 240GT performance, that the HD6670 has about 40-50% more performace over the 9600GT.
This card has plenty of performance for games published 4 years ago.
arthur449 - Tuesday, April 19, 2011 - link
Last page, middle of fourth paragraph:"... the Radeon HD 5770 and GeForce GTS 450 are both regularly on sale for under $100 and are easily 30% faster than the 6770."
Shadowmaster625 - Tuesday, April 19, 2011 - link
Newegg has a sapphire 5750 for $103 ARhttp://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N8...
Best part is it can apparently be flashed into a 5770.
A 5770 curbstomps a 6670, by more than 50%.
Jasker - Tuesday, April 19, 2011 - link
Finally an actual comparison using an older card. I've been using my 8800 GTS 512 for years and yet to really see a game I could determine for sure was GPU bound (I have an old dual Operaton CPU). Thanks to this article I know I can almost definately see some games with todays mid range cards. Thanks!mosox - Tuesday, April 19, 2011 - link
you don't include the HD video quality benchmark but a load of TWIMTBP games instead.Read Tomshardware for a decent review.
Spivonious - Tuesday, April 19, 2011 - link
Agreed. These cards are not marketed towards gamers. They will more likely be used for media playback and casual gaming, not running Crysis.SlyNine1 - Wednesday, April 20, 2011 - link
No, I wouldn't buy a 6670 for someone thats just going to use it for media playback. There are much better options for that.casteve - Tuesday, April 19, 2011 - link
"The 5570 was the ultimate HTPC card, but the 6450 has dethroned it. "Except Ganesh is still in hiding.....so, you can't say it definatively.
I was going to say, these aren't gaming cards. Then I wandered over to the March 2011 Steam Hardware survey and found ~29% of users had 1280x1024 or less monitors. Yow.
The other humorous factoid was how the 6670 was the equivalent of the venerable 8800 GT; using 30W less in idle and half the power under load. Sort of a nice data point for progress.
But, the biggest missing piece to this article is the analysis for HTPC. How well do the 65xx/66xx score versus the 55xx/56xx/etc? How well do they implement 24fps?
Finally, Adobe is using gpu acceleration for some Photoshop/Lightroom/etc features. It would be nice (instead of Adobe's vague 'you can use your gpu card to accelerate' premise) to have some benchmarks for these lower tier cards to see what they actually do and whether a bottom end card is all you truly need for these apps.
Belard - Tuesday, April 19, 2011 - link
Agreed.Thing is, these new cards are quite usable for people on a budget - for gaming, or to do some gaming in an HTPC, which the 6450 cannot do. I still play games on my rather old 4670.
The video quality and feature set is what makes the 6000 series better than the 5000 and of course the GeForce cards which have severe HTPC / video output issues.
Spivonious - Tuesday, April 19, 2011 - link
Can the charts with noise levels please include the noise floor of the room, or of the system without the video card installed (which I'm assuming is around 41dBA in this case)? Also, can the distance of measurement be included? I would love to see measurements taken at two distances - one next to the case and one about 3-5 feet away to get the level at a normal seating distance.