Sapphire HD 5670 1GB GDDR5 Review

Heat & Acoustics

For all temperature testing, the cards were placed on an open test bench with a single 120mm 1200RPM fan placed ~8” away from the heatsink. The ambient temperature was kept at a constant 22°C (+/- 0.5°C). If the ambient temperatures rose above 23°C at any time throughout the test, all benchmarking was stopped. For this test we use the 3DMark Batch Size test at it highest triangle count with 4xAA and 16xAF enabled and looped it for one hour to determine the peak load temperature as measured by GPU-Z.

For Idle tests, we let the system idle at the Vista desktop for 15 minutes and recorded the peak temperature.


While we might rib on Sapphire a bit for their use of a dual slot heatsink on an extremely efficient card, we really can’t fault them too much considering the temperatures this thing returns. It’s simply the coolest, quietest running card we have come across in a long, long time. Simply amazing.

Power Consumption

For this test we hooked up our power supply to a UPM power meter that will log the power consumption of the whole system twice every second. In order to stress the GPU as much as possible we once again use the Batch Render test in 3DMark06 and let it run for 30 minutes to determine the peak power consumption while letting the card sit at a stable Windows desktop for 30 minutes to determine the peak idle power consumption. We have also included several other tests as well. Please note that after extensive testing, we have found that simply plugging in a power meter to a wall outlet or UPS will NOT give you accurate power consumption numbers due to slight changes in the input voltage. Thus we use a Tripp-Lite 1800W line conditioner between the 120V outlet and the power meter.


Efficiency is where ATI’s 5000 series really shines and the results we received from the HD 5670 1GB are simply stunning considering its performance in the games we tested. Granted, idle and load power consumption is beat slightly by the underperforming GT 240 1GB but to us that really doesn’t count for much considering it and the HD 5670 are in totally different weight classes when it comes to gaming potential.