| PowerColor Go! Green Radeon HD5670 |  |
| Reviews - Featured Reviews: Video Cards | |
| Written by Dan Ferguson - Edited by Olin Coles | |
| Thursday, 13 May 2010 | |
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PowerColor Go! Green HD5670 Video CardFor the environmentally, economically and otherwise interested parties, PowerColor has introduced a new line of graphics cards under the "Go! Green" banner. These cards aim to reduce power consumption by half while still competing with and beating the competition. Benchmark Reviews has obtained the AX5670 1GBD5-NS3H which has been modified from the HD 5670 reference design to include an extra 512MB of memory as well as reduce power consumption. This review will test the lofty goals set by PowerColor as well as reveal the truth about going green. When first released and tested, the reference HD 5670 consistently under-performed close competitors like NVIDIA's 9800GT. As a result the 5670 was initially priced to closer to the GTS 240. Since that time the price on the 9800GT has dropped into a competitive range. Part of the performance anemia in the reference design may be due to ATI's stance on RAM. It has been consistently claimed that 512MB of memory is enough to support computations. Yet third parties like PowerColor consistently bolster the reference design by adding more and faster memory. In the case of the Go! Green AX5670 only the quantity was increased, possibly in hopes to step above the limitations of the reference design and close the gap on the competition. Another smart move by PowerColor was choosing reference cards with already low power consumption to performance ratios and making them even better.
The Go! Green claim is to reduce power consumption the HD 5750 model with a result of halving the 584 kgs of carbon dioxide emitted from a video card in a year. The most obvious change is the use of a passive GPU cooler rather than a fan. As they say on their site, "Silence is Green." Does this claim hold true for their HD 5670? Two great decisions by PowerColor poise the card to have impressive results, but the numbers and graphs will tell the real story. About the company: PowerColorPowerColor, established by Tul Corporation in 1997, is a graphics industry leading brand name now and well known for its outstanding performance and innovative technology. As a leading provider of graphics card, PowerColor offers powerful, reliable and cost-effective solutions to customers worldwide. PowerColor is the platform of choice for avid PC gamers and video prosumers looking to get the best possible performance out of the latest graphics processors from ATI. PowerColor graphics cards deliver every-last-drop of super-charged performance from ATI's most advanced visual processing units (VPU). Running a PowerColor graphics card, today's gamers are able to unleash the 3D graphics performance of their favorite game playing it the way it was meant to be played.
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Comments
Final comment is on the design (owning a Go! Green 5570), fanless? Sure quieter, but a 1w silent fan could probably save 2-3w on a low power card and 5-8w on a high draw card by reducing temperatures 10-15c. My 5570 benchmarks in my case at 56c using furmark and with a 1.4w 80mm held up against it drops to 35c stable (21c drop). That has gotta be worth a few watts through better electrical efficiency running 21c cooler.
Can you tell us more about the failure mode?