AMD's ATI Radeon HD 5670 is a $99 DirectX 11 gem

PC gamers, you're living in good times when you can buy a high-performance graphics card that supports the latest DirectX platform for under $100 ... this is what AMD's new ATI Radeon HD 5670 "Redwood" offers.

Check out the Radeon HD 5670 image gallery

It was pretty obvious that AMD would eventually offer a 5xxx series graphics card for under $100 following the success of the HD 48xx series. The HD 5670 is a heck of a card. Just like the mega high-end HD 5970 X2 it has support for Eyefinity that allows you to spread your display over multiple monitors, ATI Stream support to allows the GPU to carry out non-graphics related tasks, as well as support for Microsoft's latest DirectX 11 graphics engine.

Power-wise, there's a fair gulf between the HD 5670 and its HD 5970 X2 big brother. That said, you get power that you could only have dreamt about a few years ago:

• 620 gigaflops
• 775 MHz core clock
• 400 stream processors
• 512MB or 1GB of GDDR5 RAM running at 4 Gbps
• 627 million transistors
• Peak power consumption of 61W of power (and around 14W when the card is at idle).

 

This is a fantastic card that will satify the casual gamer running games at 1,680 by 1,050 or less. Above this resolution gamers (and we're into hardcore gamer country now) will need something more powerful.

How does it compare to the competition? Well, the closest card that competes with the HD 5670 is NVIDIA's GeForece GT240. The two cards are pretty close in terms of performance, but remember that the GT240 doesn't support DirectX 11. If you want DirectX 11 support and have a $100 to spend, your decision is easy. If you don't care, flip a coin!