Feature Articles

AMD's Young Turks - Radeon HD 6670 and 6570

By Vincent Chang - 2 May 2011

Test Setup

Test Setup

Our usual X58 testbed, which consists of the following configuration, will be used to evaluate the performance of these graphics cards.

  • Intel Core i7-975 (3.33GHz)
  • Gigabyte GA-EX58-UD4P motherboard
  • 3 x 1GB DDR3-1333 G.Skill memory in triple channel mode
  • Seagate 7200.10 200GB SATA hard drive
  • Windows 7 Ultimate

These new AMD Radeons are targeted at the lower end and entry level segment, with the most expensive, the Radeon HD 6670 priced just below US$100. Hence, we have also included some of its competitors in this admittedly narrow price range, like the GeForce GT 520 (~US$60), the GeForce 430 (~US$70), as well as older Radeons like the Radeon HD 5570 and 5670, which are still pretty competitive in this segment. While we would have liked to show how these cards compare with a slightly higher tier of cards like the 6700 series from AMD and GeForce GT 550 from NVIDIA, they are quite a lot faster than these lower tier graphics cards and would have made the comparisons a lot messier.

Here are the full list of cards tested and the driver versions used:

  • Sapphire Radeon HD 6670 1GB GDDR5 (Catalyst 11.4)
  • HIS Radeon HD 6570 Silence 1GB GDDR5 (Catalyst 11.4)
  • HIS Radeon HD 6450 Silence 1GB GDDR5 (Catalyst 11.4)
  • NVIDIA GeForce GT 520 (ForceWare 270.61)
  • NVIDIA GeForce GT 430 (ForceWare 259.36)
  • ATI Radeon HD 5670 (Catalyst 10.9)
  • ATI Radeon HD 5570 (Catalyst 10.9)

For these entry level graphics cards, we have revised our benchmarks with less demanding settings, though that's still no guarantee of playable frames in some cases:

  • Futuremark 3DMark Vantage
  • Crysis Warhead (Overall settings: Mainstream)
  • Far Cry 2 (Overall settings: High)
  • Warhammer: Dawn of War 2 (Overall settings: Low)
  • Battlefield Bad Company 2 (Overall settings: Low)
  • "Heaven" from Unigine v2.1 (Overall settings: Low)
  • S.T.A.L.K.E.R.: Call of Pripyat (Overall settings: Medium)
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