Graphics Cards

The recent release of the Radeon HD 6450, 6570 and 6670 graphics cards brings the much lauded AMD HD 6000 series to the entry and budget segments. AMD introduced the higher-end cards first to garner interest, with the HD 6850, 6870, 6950, and 6970 all racking up accolades left and right. The new budget cards also offer better performance per dollar, substantial energy savings and improved video decoding capabilities and support for stereoscopic 3D playback.

The Radeon HD 6850 is AMD's sub US$200 entrant in the discrete graphics card market. We have two on the bench to compare, a reference sample from AMD, and the Asus EA6850DirectCU, which is overclocked, has an adjustable core voltage, and is cooled using a direct-touch heatpipe heatsink. They turn out to be winners, especially the Asus.

AMD's new Radeon HD 6870 is not a revolutionary game-changer, but with enhancements in efficiency and performance as well as extra display features, these video cards based on the new Barts core offer a lot of value in the competitive $250 bracket.

The HIS HD 5550/5570 are a trio of budget graphics cards that have good potential for silent cooling. Though not great for 3D performance, they are energy efficient and they are all equipped with fanless heatsinks.

The Radeon HD 5870 is one of the fastest GPUs on the market, offering excellent performance for the newest PC games. HIS takes it one step further with its Turbo edition by overclocking the core and memory speeds and slapping on their own custom cooler.

Our first Radeon HD 5750 sample comes courtesy of Asus in the form of the EAH5750 Formula, a small, midrange graphics card with a rather interesting race-car style heatsink. As the HD 5000 series' energy efficiency is well-known, the unique cooler has the potential to be fairly quiet.

The ATI Radeon HD 5450 and HD 5570 are the lowest models in ATI's HD 5000 family. The 5450 may make a perfect HTPC card, while the 5570 is one step up, hoping to deliver reasonable 3D performance at a reasonable price.

The Radeon HD 5850 is a high-end graphics card with plenty of performance enhancements over ATI's previous generation, improved power consumption, and advantages like triple display support and the ability to bitstream Dolby TrueHD and DTS-HD audio.

Not content with the performance/price edge the Radeon HD 4830 currently enjoys over the GeForce 9800GT, ATI has decided to hammer the $100 graphics market further with the new Radeon HD 4770 released today. Built using a 40nm manufacturing process, ATI positions it as a better performing, more energy efficient replacement for the HD 4830.

The HD 4890 is ATI's newest GPU, on step beyond the HD 4870. It is the fastest single GPU graphics card produced by ATI. We're most interested in seeing if power consumption and noise level has improved over the 4870.

The GTS 250 shares the same GPU core as the 9800 GTX+, a midrange gaming graphics card. Though the core is unchanged, the PCB has undergone some revision, perhaps to reduce power consumption. That could be one explanation for the smaller heatsink atop Sparkle's 1GB version of the GTS 250.

The Asus EN9400GT Silent edition is a passively cooled PCI-E graphics card based on nVidia's GeForce 9400 processor. If GeForce 9 was an office hierarchy, the 9400 would be its star mail boy. To differentiate itself from the other mail boys, it only has to be silent and power efficient.

The Asus Radeon HD 4870 Matrix features two fans without a restrictive shroud, giving the heatsink more room to "breathe", and providing direct airflow to the GPU and board components. By sharing the cooling work between two fans, it should be a quieter, cooler card. We pit the Asus Matrix against ATI's reference design.

The Radeon HD 4650 is a slightly cut-down version of the HD 4670, but still retains much of the performance of its bigger brother. The SCS is PowerColor's fanless version of the HD 4650, featuring a simple heatpipe cooler reminiscent of the Arctic Cooling Accelero series. Does it perform well, or is it simply adequate?