Video Card

If you hadn't already guessed it by the inclusion of a couple of low profile brackets, the card is of course a low profile model. The big difference between this model and the HD 5450 is the decision to go with active cooling on the model.

There's not a whole lot to look at. The small fan we know is going to cause a little bit of noise due to the nature of the size and high RPM. Like the HD 5600 series above it, the model lacks a need for an extra power connector which is always nice.

Due to the low profile nature of the model, we've got ourselves a VGA port alongside the DisplayPort and Dual-Link DVI connector. While we do have support for Eyefinity, it's worth noting that like the HD 5450, one of the connections are going to have to be via VGA which means you're going to have a screen that is connected via an analogue connection instead of a digital one. This will in turn slightly affect the image quality of that one monitor.

Specifications

The first standout point for the model would be the fact that like the HD 5450 we see the use of GDDR3 memory instead of GDDR5 which we've seen on the HD 5600 series and above. This is what we think will cause the biggest difference in performance and make it lean more towards the HD 5450 than the HD 5600.

As for the clocks, we see a 650MHz core which is the same as the HD 5450. As for the 1GB of GDDR3 memory, that comes in at 1800MHz DDR which is 200MHz DDR higher than the HD 5450. The big difference between the two models is the HD 5570 uses a 128-bit memory bus instead of a 64-bit one as well as offering twice the amount of ROPs at 16 and 400 Unified Shaders instead of the 8 seen on the HD 5450.

While the clocks don't look amazing, the numbers outside of them look a lot nicer. Let's check out the test system before getting into the results.