I like to point out to enthusiasts that this is not necessarily positioned to be a card you build a new system around.
What the 5670 is, its a great drop in upgrade for that guy that purchased a cheap, but decent HP, or Emachines box for basic use, many of those have an open PCIE slot these days. The guy who says to himself after the fact, damn, I wish I could play Call of Duty, or or Command and Conquer on this damn thing, but it wont work!! The 5670 is their solution and it will run in their crappy mini tower, with the crappy little power supply.
Drop it in, update driver, bam, your in business, and as long as your willing to keep the resolutions reasonable, and not turn on every graphical bell and whistle, you can get surprisingly playable frame rates with it on most modern games.
Really, its designed to be the best drop in upgrade for a guy who purchased a so/so OEM desktop system, not really a card you build a new system around.
I'm surprised nobody has touched on this yet... The fact that this card does not require additional juice from the PSU makes it a very good choice for an HTPC. It would provide all the power you'd ever need for media decoding while offering excellent additional perks (such as the ability to play a lot of games on your TV).
If you're building an HTPC, it's silly to get a Radeon HD 5xxx anything. The AMD 785G has outstanding HTPC performance, at one half the price of a separate mobo and CPU.
I have the Sapphire HD 5670 video card and I'm experiencing several failures with it. I'm running Win7-64 bit OS on 2 displays (46" LCD and Projector, both at 1080p through HDMI cables) and here's what I'm seeing fail.
- PowerDVD does not recognize this card as HDCP compliant... so no Blu Ray movies.
- Cannot enter and wake from sleep states, I get system hangs.
- Cannot switch from 1920x1080 to 1280x1024 without a system hang.
- Cannot get through a 3DMark Benchmark without a hang.
- When I play a movie using PowerDVD it only shows up on one display, not both.
How do I know this was all video card related? Because I dropped in an NVidia 9600 and every issue was GONE.
Thrax
🐌Austin, TX Icrontian
Comments
What the 5670 is, its a great drop in upgrade for that guy that purchased a cheap, but decent HP, or Emachines box for basic use, many of those have an open PCIE slot these days. The guy who says to himself after the fact, damn, I wish I could play Call of Duty, or or Command and Conquer on this damn thing, but it wont work!! The 5670 is their solution and it will run in their crappy mini tower, with the crappy little power supply.
Drop it in, update driver, bam, your in business, and as long as your willing to keep the resolutions reasonable, and not turn on every graphical bell and whistle, you can get surprisingly playable frame rates with it on most modern games.
Really, its designed to be the best drop in upgrade for a guy who purchased a so/so OEM desktop system, not really a card you build a new system around.
I can run Ultra settings in WoW on my 4870 at stock speeds with no problem at 1600 X 1200.
Are you serious?
World of Warcraft = fail comparison. If you have any HD38xx card or higher you can automatically max it.
- PowerDVD does not recognize this card as HDCP compliant... so no Blu Ray movies.
- Cannot enter and wake from sleep states, I get system hangs.
- Cannot switch from 1920x1080 to 1280x1024 without a system hang.
- Cannot get through a 3DMark Benchmark without a hang.
- When I play a movie using PowerDVD it only shows up on one display, not both.
How do I know this was all video card related? Because I dropped in an NVidia 9600 and every issue was GONE.