Sapphire Announces its Low Profile Radeon HD 5570 Accelerators

SAPPHIRE Technology is now shipping a new family of graphics cards in the highly successful HD 5000 series. The SAPPHIRE HD 5570 is a new low profile model aimed at the mainstream market, whist sharing many of the exciting features of the latest high end series.

The SAPPHIRE HD 5500 series is based on the latest graphics architecture from the ATI division of AMD, the second generation of GPU to be built in its 40nm process. It supports the advanced graphical features of Microsoft DirectX 11, and delivers superb video clarity and visual effects, whilst consuming very low power levels.

SAPPHIRE will offer several variants of this product. All of them have 400 Stream processors and support Microsoft DirectX 11 as well as accelerating applications compatible with ATI Stream. As the core technology is low power, no external power connection is required, making this series ideal for system upgrades or mainstream PCs that do not have high end power supplies.

The SAPPHIRE HD 5570 is equipped with 1GB of DDR3 memory, with clock speeds of 650MHz core and 900MHz (1800MHz effective) for the memory, The low profile PCB is a SAPPHIRE original design with a low noise fan assisted cooler. One model has the output configuration of Dual-Link DVI, DisplayPort and VGA. This model will support three monitors in ATI Eyefinity mode with a suitable DisplayPort monitor or active display adapter. A second model will offer the alternative output configuration of DVI, HDMI and VGA, allowing the use of HDMI enabled monitors or digital TVs to be directly driven with both video and sound signals over a single HDMI cable. Retail versions of the cards will ship with additional replacement low profile brackets enabling these models to be fitted into low profile cases.

Native CrossFire support allows two or more cards to be used together for additional performance on a suitable CrossFireX compatible mainboard. On the HD 5500 series, CrossFireX is supported in software by the driver, and no additional interconnect is required.

The SAPPHIRE HD 5500 series is fully compatible with current DirectX10.1, DirectX 10 and DirectX 9.0 games and applications, but will show stunning new levels of detail, transparency and lighting effects in newer releases of software using DirectX 11. All of this comes with very low active power consumption as well as Dynamic Power Management delivering super low-power operation (10W) in 2D or idle.

Ideal for media applications, the SAPPHIRE HD 5570 has an on board hardware UVD (Unified Video decoder) considerably reducing CPU load and delivering smooth decoding of Blu-ray™ and HD DVD content for both VC-1 and H.264 codecs, as well as Mpeg files.

In all of the SAPPHIRE HD 5000 series the UVD has been enhanced to be able simultaneously to decode two 1080p HD video streams and to be able to display HD video in high quality with Windows Aero mode enabled. HDMI capability has also been upgraded to HDMI 1.3a with Dolby TrueHD and DTS-HD Master Audio support.

The HD 5500 series supports the latest features demanded by Microsoft DirectX 11, including DirectCompute 11 instructions, hardware Tessellation and multi-threaded communications with the system CPU. These combine to provide new capabilities for the interaction between transparent objects, new lighting and accelerated post processing effects as well as physics calculations and accelerated video transcoding. They also support ATI Stream, accelerating supported applications such as video transcoding and rendering tasks by executing instructions on the GPU architecture rather than the system CPU.

The SAPPHIRE HD 5500 series is supported by AMD's DirectX 11 WHQL certified graphics driver which delivers support for all of the key DirectX 11 level features required for new gaming experiences and acceleration of next generation high performance applications. Additional models in the series will be available in the coming weeks.