HIS Radeon HD 5670 IceQ Video Card Review
Introduction
Contents
Radeon HD 5670 is one of the latest mainstream video processors from AMD and today we are going to review the IceQ version from HIS (a.k.a. H567Q512), which features a nice cooling system, 512 MB GDDR5 and runs at stock clock settings.
Video cards based on Radeon HD 5670 with 512 MB can be found anywhere between USD 85 and USD 95 (this particular model from HIS can be found for USD 84 at Newegg.com), entering the same price range from Radeon HD 5570 (USD 85) and GeForce GT 240 (USD 90). At this price range you can also find “older” video cards like GeForce 9600 GT (USD 90), GeForce 9800 GT (USD 95) and Radeon HD 4670 (USD 95). It is important to note that all these prices are an average, you can find products being sold for more or for less.
In this review we will compare this Radeon HD 5670 to GeForce GT 240, Radeon HD 5570 and GeForce 9800 GT in order to answer two simple questions: is this video card better than GeForce GT 240? Which one of these video cards presents the best bang for the buck?
In the table below we compare the main specifications from the video cards we included in our review. As you can see, Radeon HD 5670 is basically a Radeon HD 5570 running at a higher clock rate and using a faster memory (GDDR5 instead of GDDR3). As you can see AMD-based models have as an advantage having more processors (“shader units”) and supporting DirectX 11, while on NVIDIA-based models the shader processors run at a higher clock rate (the second number under “core clock”). All cards reviewed were running at the chip manufacturer’s default configuration (i.e., no factory overclocking).
| Video Card | Core Clock | Memory Clock (Real) | Memory Clock (Effective) | Memory Interface | Memory Transfer Rate | Memory | Shaders | DirectX |
| HIS Radeon HD 5570 | 650 MHz | 900 MHz | 1.8 GHz | 128-bit | 28.8 GB/s | 1 GB GDDR3 | 400 | 11 |
| HIS Radeon HD 5670 | 775 MHz | 1 GHz | 4 GHz | 128-bit | 64 GB/s | 512 MB GDDR5 | 400 | 11 |
| ECS GeForce GT 240 | 550 MHz / 1.34 GHz | 850 MHz | 3.4 GHz | 128-bit | 54.4 GB/s | 512 MB GDDR5 | 96 | 10.1 |
| Palit GeForce 9800 GT | 600 MHz / 1.5 GHz | 900 MHz | 1.8 GHz | 256-bit | 57.6 GB/s | 1 GB GDDR3 | 112 | 10 |
You can compare the specs of these video cards with other video cards by taking a look at our AMD ATI Chips Comparison Table and NVIDIA Chips Comparison Table tutorials.
Now let’s take a complete look at this model from HIS.