I'm sure most of you know this by now (I searched the forums to see if anyone else posted this info, so hopefully this can help people decide now that HD audio is supported) - but just in case you don't - this is very good news for all of us HTPC owners. By itself, the videocard is definitely more than adequate for HD and Blu-ray playback at 1080p - flawlessly. But up until now, no GFX card had built in decoders for the HD audio formats - until this the ATI 5xxx series. The other ones, such as the 5870 and 5970 support it - but the cons are its two slot sizes, requires extra power connectors, and is very LONG.
But now, with the 5670 - it is small, uses up to 75watts under FULL LOAD and 15-17 while Idle, supports HD audio-codecs, and IS GOING TO BE PRICED UNDER $100. This makes it a new standard for HTPC video-cards and very affordable. No more additional cards such as the ASUS to decode the HD streams......yay! Although, if you want a serious gaming-htpc - this card will do it adequately, but if you have the money (over $375) and space in your HTPC - I would get the 5870 (like me) or 5970 card.
AND LASTLY - all of the card manufactures, Sapphire, Gigabyte, Powercolor, XFX, etc., have the i/o outputs built-in. There is one DVI port, one HDMI port, and one VGA port. No more dvi adapters! yeah! Oh, and you can use all three outputs at the same time.
Anywho, here are the specs!
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ATI Radeon™ HD 5670 GPU Feature Summary
627 million 40nm transistors
TeraScale 2 Unified Processing Architecture
400 Stream Processing Units
20 Texture Units
32 Z/Stencil ROP Units
8 Color ROP Units
GDDR5 memory interface
PCI Express 2.1 x16 bus interface
DirectX® 11 support
Shader Model 5.0
DirectCompute 11
Programmable hardware tessellation unit
Accelerated multi-threading
HDR texture compression
Order-independent transparency
OpenGL 3.2 support1
Image quality enhancement technology
Up to 24x multi-sample and super-sample anti-aliasing modes
Adaptive anti-aliasing
16x angle independent anisotropic texture filtering
128-bit floating point HDR rendering
ATI Eyefinity multi-display technology2,3
Three independent display controllers
Drive three displays simultaneously with independent resolutions, refresh rates, color controls, and video overlays
Display grouping
Combine multiple displays to behave like a single large display
ATI Stream acceleration technology
OpenCL support15
DirectCompute 11
Accelerated video encoding, transcoding, and upscaling4,5
Native support for common video encoding instructions
ATI CrossFireX™ multi-GPU technology6
Dual GPU scaling
ATI Avivo HD Video & Display technology7
UVD 2 dedicated video playback accelerator
Advanced post-processing and scaling8
Dynamic contrast enhancement and color correction
Brighter whites processing (blue stretch)
Independent video gamma control
Dynamic video range control
Support for H.264, VC-1, MPEG-2, and Adobe Flash9
Dual-stream 1080p playback support 10,11
DXVA 1.0 & 2.0 support
Integrated dual-link DVI output with HDCP12
Max resolution: 2560x160013
Integrated DisplayPort output
Max resolution: 2560x160013
Integrated HDMI 1.3 output with Deep Color, xvYCC wide gamut support, and high bit-rate audio
Max resolution: 1920x120013
Integrated VGA output
Max resolution: 2048x153613
3D stereoscopic display/glasses support14
Integrated HD audio controller
Output protected high bit rate 7.1 channel surround sound over HDMI with no additional cables required
Supports AC-3, AAC, Dolby TrueHD and DTS Master Audio formats
ATI PowerPlay™ power management technology7
Dynamic power management with low power idle state
Ultra-low power state support for multi-GPU configurations
Certified drivers for Windows 7, Windows Vista, and Windows XP
Speeds & Feeds
Engine clock speed: 775 MHz
Processing power (single precision): 620 GigaFLOPS
Polygon throughput: 775M polygons/sec
Data fetch rate (32-bit): 62 billion fetches/sec
Texel fill rate (bilinear filtered): 15.5 Gigatexels/sec
Pixel fill rate: 6.2 Gigapixels/sec
Anti-aliased pixel fill rate: 24.8 Gigasamples/sec
Memory clock speed: 1.0 GHz
Memory data rate: 4.0 Gbps
Memory bandwidth: 64 GB/sec
Maximum board power: 64 Watts
Idle board power: 15 Watts
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or on second thought, you could just wait for the new Intel i3. It will eliminate the need for a GFX card and sound card altogther, as the i3 (or i5, i7, i9) will be comparable to mid-level Ati and Nvidia Cards, and support HD audio decoding...so that's a huge reason to wait, that's if you want a small HTPC but with the full-support of 1080p flawlessly and HD audio, flawlessly...just saying. (Although, for my needs of serious-HTPC gaming on my 50" LCD TV - the i3 wouldn't suffice.)
But now, with the 5670 - it is small, uses up to 75watts under FULL LOAD and 15-17 while Idle, supports HD audio-codecs, and IS GOING TO BE PRICED UNDER $100. This makes it a new standard for HTPC video-cards and very affordable. No more additional cards such as the ASUS to decode the HD streams......yay! Although, if you want a serious gaming-htpc - this card will do it adequately, but if you have the money (over $375) and space in your HTPC - I would get the 5870 (like me) or 5970 card.
AND LASTLY - all of the card manufactures, Sapphire, Gigabyte, Powercolor, XFX, etc., have the i/o outputs built-in. There is one DVI port, one HDMI port, and one VGA port. No more dvi adapters! yeah! Oh, and you can use all three outputs at the same time.
Anywho, here are the specs!
----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
ATI Radeon™ HD 5670 GPU Feature Summary
627 million 40nm transistors
TeraScale 2 Unified Processing Architecture
400 Stream Processing Units
20 Texture Units
32 Z/Stencil ROP Units
8 Color ROP Units
GDDR5 memory interface
PCI Express 2.1 x16 bus interface
DirectX® 11 support
Shader Model 5.0
DirectCompute 11
Programmable hardware tessellation unit
Accelerated multi-threading
HDR texture compression
Order-independent transparency
OpenGL 3.2 support1
Image quality enhancement technology
Up to 24x multi-sample and super-sample anti-aliasing modes
Adaptive anti-aliasing
16x angle independent anisotropic texture filtering
128-bit floating point HDR rendering
ATI Eyefinity multi-display technology2,3
Three independent display controllers
Drive three displays simultaneously with independent resolutions, refresh rates, color controls, and video overlays
Display grouping
Combine multiple displays to behave like a single large display
ATI Stream acceleration technology
OpenCL support15
DirectCompute 11
Accelerated video encoding, transcoding, and upscaling4,5
Native support for common video encoding instructions
ATI CrossFireX™ multi-GPU technology6
Dual GPU scaling
ATI Avivo HD Video & Display technology7
UVD 2 dedicated video playback accelerator
Advanced post-processing and scaling8
Dynamic contrast enhancement and color correction
Brighter whites processing (blue stretch)
Independent video gamma control
Dynamic video range control
Support for H.264, VC-1, MPEG-2, and Adobe Flash9
Dual-stream 1080p playback support 10,11
DXVA 1.0 & 2.0 support
Integrated dual-link DVI output with HDCP12
Max resolution: 2560x160013
Integrated DisplayPort output
Max resolution: 2560x160013
Integrated HDMI 1.3 output with Deep Color, xvYCC wide gamut support, and high bit-rate audio
Max resolution: 1920x120013
Integrated VGA output
Max resolution: 2048x153613
3D stereoscopic display/glasses support14
Integrated HD audio controller
Output protected high bit rate 7.1 channel surround sound over HDMI with no additional cables required
Supports AC-3, AAC, Dolby TrueHD and DTS Master Audio formats
ATI PowerPlay™ power management technology7
Dynamic power management with low power idle state
Ultra-low power state support for multi-GPU configurations
Certified drivers for Windows 7, Windows Vista, and Windows XP
Speeds & Feeds
Engine clock speed: 775 MHz
Processing power (single precision): 620 GigaFLOPS
Polygon throughput: 775M polygons/sec
Data fetch rate (32-bit): 62 billion fetches/sec
Texel fill rate (bilinear filtered): 15.5 Gigatexels/sec
Pixel fill rate: 6.2 Gigapixels/sec
Anti-aliased pixel fill rate: 24.8 Gigasamples/sec
Memory clock speed: 1.0 GHz
Memory data rate: 4.0 Gbps
Memory bandwidth: 64 GB/sec
Maximum board power: 64 Watts
Idle board power: 15 Watts
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or on second thought, you could just wait for the new Intel i3. It will eliminate the need for a GFX card and sound card altogther, as the i3 (or i5, i7, i9) will be comparable to mid-level Ati and Nvidia Cards, and support HD audio decoding...so that's a huge reason to wait, that's if you want a small HTPC but with the full-support of 1080p flawlessly and HD audio, flawlessly...just saying. (Although, for my needs of serious-HTPC gaming on my 50" LCD TV - the i3 wouldn't suffice.)
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