Introduction

Last year AMD released their new Radeon HD 5800 Series of graphics cards which quickly became a big success due to the numerous improvements made over previous generations. Over the course of the last months AMD has been adding more cards to their DirectX 11 lineup quickly. Today their latest part of the series, the Radeon HD 5600 is unveiled. It is based on AMD's Redwood graphics processor which is made in a 40 nm process at TSMC Taiwan.



Essentially Redwood is a cut in half Juniper GPU which is a cut in half Cypress GPU. This approach lets AMD easily pick price points based on one central GPU design without huge engineering lead time. Using the Radeon HD 5670, AMD is targeting the $99 segment which is quite crowded with cards like GeForce GT 240, 9600 GT and 9800 GT. AMD's own products here are HD 4770, HD 4830 and HD 4850.

The GPU features everything that the more powerful Radeon HD 5000 cards offer: Direct X11, EyeFinity, HDMI Audio bitstreaming, low power consumption and more.

Even though the HIS Radeon HD 5670 IceQ uses both a custom PCB design and a custom cooling solution it comes with specifications that match those of AMD's reference design. This has probably been enforced by AMD to start out all AIBs with a level playing field.

	Radeon HD 4670	GeForce GT 240	GeForce 9600 GT	HIS Radeon HD 5670	GeForce 9800 GT
Shader units	320	96	64	400	112
ROPs	8	8	16	8	16
GPU	RV730	GT215	G94	Redwood	G92
Transistors	512M	727M	505M	627M	754M
Memory Size	512 MB	512 MB / 1024 MB	512 MB	512 MB	512 MB
Memory Bus Width	128 bit	128 bit	256 bit	128 bit	256 bit
Core Clock	750 MHz	550 MHz	650 MHz	775 MHz	600 MHz
Memory Clock	1000 MHz	1700 MHz / 1000 MHz	900 MHz	1000 MHz	900 MHz
Price	$67	$90	$80	$99	$90