Sapphire HD 5670 1GB GDDR5 Review

A Closer Look at the Sapphire HD 5670 1GB GDDR5

The first thing you will probably notice about the HD 5670 1GB is how compact it is at a mere 6 ¾“ in length and that it doesn’t need a stand-alone power connector due to its power consumption of about 75W. Unlike past 5000 series cards Sapphire has decided to go with a blue PCB instead of the black one used for higher-end cards.

It should also be mentioned that the HD 5670 will come in two forms: one which supports hardware Crossfire with the necessary connectors on the PCB for the usual bridge cables while the other will only support software Crossfire and won’t come equipped with a bridge.


The heatsink sapphire chose for this card is the Arctic Cooling Accelero L2 Pro which is in our opinion an odd choice since it takes up two slots on a card that is touted for its thermal efficiency. Is a heatsink of this size really necessary? Hopefully Sapphire will release a single slot version in the near future but we hear rumors that the reference single slot ATI heatsink isn’t quite up to the job of cooling off this card.

The Arctic Cooling L2 Pro is a basic heatsink that is comprised of a multi-bladed 92mm fan that pushes cool air over an aluminum heatsink which doesn’t touch the GDDR5 memory modules. Since there is supposedly very little heat produced by the 40nm Redwood core, there should be no worries of excess heat buildup within your case.


The back of the card shows us an additional four 128MB GDDR5 memory modules. These H5GQ1H24AFR Hynix modules are rated for 5Ghz (5Gbps) at 1.5V so they should have some additional overcloking headroom left in them.


The backplate is a HTPC user’s dream come true. Included are connectors for DVI, HDMI and DisplayPort which is basically everything that’s needed for a card of this stature but in case you were wondering, this card DOES support Eyefinity.


Even though we mentioned length at the beginning of this section, when comparing it to other cards the actual compact size of the HD 5670 comes into stark contrast. It is slightly shorter than the HD 5750 and exactly the same size as some companies’ GT 240 cards. However, it is important to remember that some GT 240s (particularly those made by EVGA) are slightly longer than the one we used in the picture above.