Sapphire HD5670 Ultimate Edition Review

Yet again Sapphire have released a video card that we would consider to be leading the way. Not only is the card completely silent with the passive cooler but you are not expected to sacrifice performance, as the clocks are identical to the reference fan based solution.

Not only are you getting the ‘full HD5670' experience, but our sample had considerable headroom on the core as we managed to squeeze another 100mhz out of it before any artifacting and instabillity occurred. The cooler handled the overclocked speeds with ease and even in a less impressive case we would see no issues if you wanted a few extra frames with most of the modern engines.

Right now we don't have a solid release price, however as the 1GB GDDR5 fan based Sapphire HD5670 retails for around £93 now, we would expect this to be priced in a similar fashion. I think under £100 for this card proves excellent value. Two of them in Crossfire should be a formidable, yet totally silent gaming solution, even on a 24 inch panel at native resolution of 1920×1200.

While the card is very efficient and consumes only 13 watts at idle, under load it can dump substantial heat into a chassis, this is a well known issue with coolers such as these. Therefore if you are fitting this into a low end HTPC chassis we would recommend that you have at least a single fan exhausting warm air in the vicinity of the board.

KitGuru says: Sapphire have released yet another stellar, passively cooled graphics card. Their range gets stronger and stronger.

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