ATI Radeon HD 5570: Affordable DX11 GPU

While the Radeon HD 5570 may not have burned through the gaming benchmarks like a high-end, more expensive card would have, it did put up some decent scores considering its price point. It may not me a gamer's dream card, but the Radeon HD 5570's half-height form factor and quiet cooling will likely appeal to the HTPC crowd. With that in mind we also tested the 5570 in a number of scenarios, playing back DVDs, Blu-Ray discs, MOV files, and ripped M2TS files.

The Radeon HD 5570 was flawless during playback of all video types and CPU utilization was extremely low (as you can see in the screen-cap above). In addition, we should note that Adobe now supports GPU acceleration of Flash video when using the latest 10.1 beta and the 5570 also performed well playing back HD vids from sites llike Hulu, Youtube and the like.

Before bringing this article to a close, we'd like to cover a few final data points--namely power consumption and noise. Throughout all of our benchmarking and testing, we monitored how much power our test system was consuming using a power meter. Our goal was to give you all an idea as to how much power each configuration used while idling and while under a heavy workload. Please keep in mind that we were testing total system power consumption at the outlet here, not just the power being drawn by the graphics cards alone.

As you may have expected, looking at its specifications and gaming performance, the Radeon HD 5570 is a low-power graphics card. In fact, its power consumption was the second lower of the bunch during idle and load, coming in only marginally higher than the Radeon HD 5450.