ATI Radeon HD5670

Often on OC3D we have to take the specifications from a manufacturers webpage. Today, with the HD5670 being so hot off the press that it's still sizzling, we're lucky enough to have a slide from ATI themselves demonstrating the power that this card possesses.

As you can see the main point of interest here is that the GigaFLOPS rating is equal to the Nvidia 9800GTX which ruled the roost for a long while in its 8800GTX guise.

None of the ATI cards have similar theoretical performance levels, although the 4830 comes closest. As we all know though, pure operations per second is only part of the story and how the card goes about handling those instructions in a streamlined manner is just as important.

The other main point is the excellent clock speed. 775mhz is up there with many of the current budget sector cards so hopefully the cooling solution will be such that the heat generated will be well exhausted to ensure good HTPC performance and maybe allow a little headroom for the value-conscious gamer.

Proving the point that clock speed, like GFLOPS, isn't everything, this is running 25mhz faster than the 5850, but I severely doubt it will even come close in performance terms.

So like many things, on paper specifications are all well and good, but the whole architecture and design is the key to performance, rather than certain big figures.

Let's take a closer look at the card.