Sapphire Radeon HD 5570 – 1 GB DDR3 HDMI/DVI-I/VGA PCI-Express Graphics Card 100293L

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Carlos Villero “Oogie” (Irvine, CA USA) –

  

I really bought this card to “downgrade” from an Nvidia 9600 GT Low Profile Low Power card. I run a low profile Core i7 system (yes I’m crazy) primarily for doing video encoding, and I sought after a decent low profile graphics card in peacefulness to do some light gaming. But, my 9600 recently started getting unstable on me, so I needed to get a replacement. My older card used a DVI to VGA converter (yes, I have a VGA-only watch, but it has component ports in the back as well for my Wii and PS3, which is why I bought that watch in the first place), and for some wits, with it got unstable, the native resolution of my watch was unable to be detected, and when I forced it to the native resolution, it resulted in blurry areas in the middle-left and middle-right section of my watch. Now that I’m going through a native VGA port on the Radeon 5570, the sharpness came back, and the native resolution of my watch is detected.

One other thing is that this card is a standard size for a low profile card. My older 9600 GT was uncomfortably surrounded by a centimeter of touching my Blu-Ray drive in my case, whereas this card fits with enough room to spare.

Even with the “downgrade” in specs and the shrink in size, the card performs wonderfully! The Windows 7 Windows Experience Score for graphics stayed at the same place (6.8), and I’m still able to play the games I played while I had my 9600 GT. Murderer’s Creed II runs fine at full settings, Dragon’s Age runs fine at full settings, and I can continue doing my video work without worrying about my GPU failing out of nowhere.

One thing, though, that I should warn anyone installing this card into a low profile system is that you are going to need a small nutsetter as well as your run-of-the-mill Philips screwdriver in peacefulness to replace the full height sort with the low profile one. I was missing the nutsetter when I received my card, and I had to continue using my ancient card for an extra day since I needed to get my nutsetter the next day. I have by no means switched brackets on a GPU before, so this was new to me. Hopefully more people are prepared when they do what I did.

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S. Dominguez “SD” (LA, CA) –

  

The card is a small pricey but defenitetly value to have in your HTPC.. HD 5450 doesnt cut the mustard but the 5570 does.. This particular sapphire card screamed quality as soon as I pulled it out of the box.. Made me feel it was value all of what I paid for it. With 1 Gig of DDR3 Memory and HDMI with DTS MA HD pass through, this thing handles any Movie I can throw at it, both BluRay discs and MKV Rips.. By and large Very pleased..

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I picked this Sapphire version with HDMI in July to build a budget system for playing Starcraft II, with my laptop died (too much Starcraft II beta?). It runs pretty nicely on medium settings – charming in all but the leading games, where I suspect CPU may be the main limiting factor. I have shaders on medium since it doesn’t have too many shading units. Theoretically you can set textures to high since it has 1GB memory, but I left that at medium too.

Aside from that, the reasons I bought this card were the price (I believe I got it for [...] with rebate, which took forever), and the low Wattage – relative to its performance, that is. Coming at the low end of a new line of graphics cards, it benefits from the newest chip architecture and newest fabrication process.

I haven’t used the HDMI or DVI, excellent ancient style connector seems to work fine. I do need to try hooking it up to my TV some day as SC2 runs in widescreen aspect.

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