AMD Radeon HD 6670 and 6570 Mainstream GPUs

A couple of weeks ago, AMD took the wraps off of the Radeon HD 6450, an affordable DirectX 11-class graphics card targeted at users looking to upgrade from basic, integrated graphics solutions. We posted a quick look at the Radeon HD 6450 in our news, and while the card wasn’t a barn-burner, it was certainly a step up from integrated graphics. The card’s low-power characteristics, low profile, and the integration of AMD’s UVD3 video engine also made it an excellent candidate for HTPC applications.

Today AMD continues to flesh out the Radeon HD 6000 series with a few more cards targeted at more budget-friendly, mainstream market segments. As their names suggest, the new Radeon HD 6670 and Radeon HD 6570 cards launching today are somewhat more powerful than the Radeon HD 6450, but they’re also priced a little higher too. We’re still talking about really affordable price-points though; 1GB GDDR5 versions of the Radeon HD 6670 will be available for as low as $99, while the 512MB GDDR5 (or 1GB DDR3) version of Radeon HD 6570 will be available for around $79.

The specifications and main features of these new Radeon HD 6000 series cards are posted below. Then we’ll follow up with some quick and dirty performance tests on the pages ahead...

AMD Radeon HD 6570 and 6670 DirectX 11 GPUs Specifications & Features

	Radeon HD 6570 GDDR5	Radeon HD 6570 GDDR3	Radeon HD 6670
Process	40nm	40nm	40nm
Transistors	716M	716M	716M
Engine Clock	650 MHz	650 MHz	800 MHz
Stream Processors	480	480	480
Compute Performance	724 GFLOPS	724 GFLOPS	768 GFLOPS
Texture Units	24	24	24
Texture Fillrate	15.6 GTexels/s	15.6 GTexels/s	19.2 GTexels/s
ROPs	8	8	8
Pixel Fillrate	5.2 Gpixel/s	5.2 Gpixel/s	6.4 Gpixel/s
Z/Stencil	32	32	32
Memory Type	GDDR5	DDR3	GDDR5
Memory Clock	900-1000 MHz	900 MHz	1000 MHz
Memory Data Rate	4 Gbps	1.8 Gbps	4 Gbps
Memory Bandwidth	64 GB/s	28.8 GB/s	64 GB/s
Maximum Board Power	60 W	44 W	66 W
Idle Board Power	11 W	10 W	12 W

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AMD Radeon HD 6570 GDDR5 (top) and Radeon HD 6670 (bottom)

There are three new cards being announced today, GDD5 and GDDR3 versions of the Radeon HD 6570 and a GDDR5 version of the higher-end Radeon HD 6670. All three of the cards are based on the same GPU, however, and differ only in their form factors, memory configurations, and clock speeds.

At the heart of these new cards is a 716 million transistor GPU manufactured on TSMC’s 40nm process node. The GPU is outfitted with 480 stream processors, 24 texture units, and 8 ROPs, and it features a 128-bit memory interface. At its reference clocks of 650MHz for the GPU and 1GHz for the memory (4Gb/s data rate) the Radeon HD 6570 GDDR5 version offers 724 GFLOPS of compute performance, with a 5.2 GPixel/s pixel fillrate, and 64GB/s of memory bandwidth. The Radeon HD 6570 GDDR3 edition offers similar compute and fillrate numbers, but much lower peak memory bandwidth of 28.8GB/s due to the slower data rate of GDDR3 memory. The Radeon HD 6670, however, features a much higher clocked GPU, which will result in better overall performance in most instances. The reference specifications call for an 800MHz GPU clock on the Radeon HD 6670, which ups its fillrate to 6.4 GPixels/s; memory bandwidth is unchanged from the GDDR5 version of the 6570 (when 1GHz memory is used).

As you can see in the chart above, power consumption is very low on these cards as well, with the Radeon HD 6670 offering a max board power of only 66 watts under load (60 or 44 watts for the two Radeon HD 6570 cards). As such, none of these new cards requires supplemental power and heat and noise are non-issues.

Since these new cards are members of the Radeon HD 6000 family, they also share many of the same features of their higher-end counterparts, like UVD3 and Eyefinity support, among others.