I remember taking a class sometime last year titled, Shakespeare and Popular Culture, and remembered learning that Shakespeare can be found anywhere and everywhere in our society. What was one of Shakespeare’s most famous plays that had been written? If you said Romeo and Juliet, then ding ding ding, a thousand points for you. However just like “Who’s Line Is It Anyway;” the points don’t matter. Alright so you might be asking, Geneviève where the bloat are you going with this? Besides just using this as an attention getter, I am going to compare Romeo and Juliet to our beloved AMD.
AMD throughout this past year have been working their tails off to bring you the best lineup of graphics cards offered to human kind, as well as some of the best bang for buck processors that are easily in arms reach for many consumers.
“Romeo, Romeo, Wherefore Art Thou” graphics card…
AMD has now been leading the way in graphics card performance which started with their 58xx series lineup. Their 5970 is currently AMD’s power horse, but does not appeal to much of the masses with its high price point of $699.99… Besides it does not take more than an HD5870 ($399.99) to beat out the competitions beloved Nvidia GTX 285, with the HD5850 ($299.99) falling just a smidge bit behind in performance numbers. So what is the point here exactly? It is kind of like the Capulet and Montague feud, however in a way it is happening just inside of AMD.
Ok just follow me here… AMD started out with a series that completely reamed Nvidia with no sense of return after the 58xx series. However AMD did not stop there, they went on to make a more expensive card, the HD5970 and a less expensive series of cards, being the HD5700 series. However all three of the current 5000 series are still heavily geared towards gaming and not as much an all around budget card.
This is where the HD5670 comes into play. The HD5670 is for more of us that are money conscience and cannot afford the Capulet man or woman that we truly desire. Geared towards those of us that are stuck in the Montague house, however powerful enough to fight off the shoddy Capulet men and women in which we are in rivalry with everyday. Besides this Montague card is getting released today… KEEP READING
“Be not afraid of greatness: some are born great, some achieve greatness, and some have greatness thrust upon them,” as where AMD just does it all.
Ok so what does this quote have to do with anything? Think about it. This is AMD once again relating back to Shakespeare. Shakespeare said this, but this quote reflects well on our beloved AMD. Showing that they were not only born great, achieved greatness, but they also thrust that greatness among their consumers at an affordable price. THE HD5670 launches today as a sub $100 card at the price of $99.
Alright, alright I know what you are thinking. $99 does not buy you a decent video card, however AMD made sure this one did. Here are just a couple of statistics that are relevant to gaming in today’s modern age.
• Most people have a video card that is a sub $100 graphics card
• 15 Million Users have Steam accounts
• 11 ½ Million people play World of Warcraft
• Most people have a display resolution smaller than 1920×1200
So is this in a sense creating an entirely new market for those that do not play too graphic intense games? In fact that is exactly what AMD is doing with their new 56xx series. They are creating a card that is reasonably priced for the majority of consumers while giving them a 20% increase in performance over the competitors GT 240 (Nvidia). The HD5670 is also the first budget card with DirectX 11, and guess what no power connector. Thank you AMD for another great card that is energy efficient and does not require us to upgrade our power supplies just for our video card. What does this mean for Nvidia? Since the HD5670 is a DirectX 11 card, Nvidia fans are still stuck in DirectX 10 lala land until the release of Fermi. Enough about Nvidia though, how about we see the power this card has within.
Specifications:
• Compute Power 620 GigaFLOPs
• Core Clock Speed 775MHz
• Stream Procesors 400
• Memory 512MB/1GB @ 4.0 Gbps
• Typical/Idle Power 61W / 14W
• Max Displays Up to 4 simultaneously (3 at launch)
Benchmark Examples
As we can see from the above photos this card is up to 20% faster in some games over the Nvidia GT240 and fairs quite well over 30 frames per second in most games.
“But this denoted a foregone conclusion”
In the end this writer can see that the AMD ATI Radeon HD5670 will be a very popular card for the budget gamer and the general population. Who knows, maybe manufactures will begin to use this card in some of their more mainstream budget computers. Either way AMD has their phasers set to WOW and Woo us with another great product from AMD. The HD5670 will come in both a 512MB version of the card and a 1GB version. The 512MB card should run around $99 as where the 1GB version should run around $119. Either way, I am sure we could all benefit from either version of this card. Way to go AMD!
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