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.

Packaging

HIS uses their standard HD 5000 Series packaging that we have seen for several cards now.

Contents

You will receive:

• Graphics card
• Driver CD + Quick Install Guide

The Card

HIS has chosen to use an Arctic Cooling heatsink as their thermal solution, this actually seems to be the same cooler as used on the HIS HD 4670 IceQ.


Just like the AMD reference design, the cooler occupies two slots.


The card has one analog VGA port, one DVI port and one HDMI port. For a lower end card like this it certainly makes sense to have an analog VGA port, the HDMI port has basically replaced the old S-Video output by now.
For HDMI Audio, most NVIDIA cards require you to feed an external audio source, for example from your motherboard's on-board audio, to the card via SPDIF cable. AMD on the other hand has integrated a sound device inside their GPUs which is the easier solution for most users. Also AMD's integrated sound device has been upgraded to support HDMI 1.3a which includes Dolby TrueHD, DTS-HD, AC-3, DTS and up to 7.1 channel audio with 192 kHz / 24-bit.


While a physical CrossFire connector is not present, the card does support CrossFire which transfers its data via the PCI-Express bus.


Here are the front and the back of the card, high-res versions are also available (front, back). If you choose to use these images for voltmods etc, please include a link back to this site or let us post your article.