Sapphire HD5670 Flex Edition Review – low cost multiscreen productivity

While many people will be using a BluRay player with a similar system to the one we are using today, many more will be playing high definition 1080p content inside an MKV container. For testing we are playing back a 1080p version of Robin Hood which was directed by Ridley Scott and stars Russell Crowe. Our specific encoding is set to an extremely high bitrate and can cause an ATOM processor to skip frames, even at 1.8ghz.

The video below shows the movie playing on the Fusion system initially without Sapphire HD5670 FleX hardware acceleration enabled. Around half way through the video playback (40-45 seconds) we enable hardware acceleration and CPU usage drops considerably. This is how important a discrete graphics solution can be with a low powered system such as this.

We are using Cyberlink PowerDVD 10 Ultra with the latest updates for this testing.

The Sapphire HD5670 FleX Edition really helps to improve the media experience when watching 1080p MKV content. The CPU was loaded between 60 and 100 percent with acceleration off. When enabled this load reduces to between 30-25 percent. System temperatures also drop inside the chassis by 3c.

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