SAPPHIRE Launches HD 5670

New mainstream models in HD 5000 series enhance graphics experience

SAPPHIRE Technology is now shipping a new family of graphics cards in the highly successful HD 5000 series. The SAPPHIRE HD 5670 is a new low power model aimed at the mainstream market, whist sharing many of the exciting features of the latest high end series.

The SAPPHIRE HD 5670 is based on the latest graphics architecture from the ATI division of AMD, the second generation of GPU to be built in its 40nm process. It supports the advanced graphical features of Microsoft DirectX 11, and delivers spectacular video clarity, speed and visual effects, whilst consuming very low power levels.

SAPPHIRE will offer several variants of this product. All of them have 400 Stream processors and support Microsoft DirectX 11 as well as ATI Stream. As the core technology is low power, no external power connection is required, making this series ideal for system upgrades or mainstream PCs that do not have high end power supplies.

The two top models of the SAPPHIRE HD 5670 series offer a choice of 1GB or 512MB of DDR5 memory, with clock speeds of 775MHz core and 1000MHz (4GHz effective) for the memory, and a specially designed cooler from Arctic Cooling to keep noise levels to a minimum. The output configuration on the bracket is Dual-Link DVI, HDMI and DisplayPort. In addition to a DVI to VGA adapter, an HDMI to DVI adapter is included, allowing two DVI monitors to be supported, and these models will also support three monitors in ATI Eyefinity mode with a suitable DisplayPort monitor or active display adapter. Native CrossFire support allows two or more cards to be used together for additional performance on a suitable CrossFireX compatible mainboard.

Two additional models will again offer a choice of 1GB or 512MB of memory, but will be configured with the popular output configuration of DVI, HDMI and VGA on the bracket, allowing a choice of monitor types without the use of adapters.

The SAPPHIRE HD 5670 series not only boosts performance in current DirectX10.1, DirectX 10 and DirectX 9.0 games and applications, but will support stunning new levels of detail, transparency and lighting effects in newer releases of software using DirectX 11. All of this comes with low active power consumption and Dynamic Power Management delivering super low-power operation in 2D or idle.

This series of cards supports the latest features demanded by Microsoft DirectX 11, including DirectCompute 11 instructions, hardware Tessellation and multi-threaded communications with the system CPU. These combine to provide new capabilities for the interaction between transparent objects, new lighting and accelerated post processing effects as well as physics calculations and accelerated video transcoding. They also support ATI Stream, accelerating supported applications such as video transcoding and rendering tasks by executing instructions on the GPU architecture rather than the system CPU.

Like the previous generation, the SAPPHIRE HD 5000 series has an on board hardware UVD (Unified Video decoder) considerably reducing CPU load and delivering smooth decoding of Blu-ray™ and HD DVD content for both VC-1 and H.264 codecs, as well as Mpeg files. In the SAPPHIRE HD 5000 series the UVD has been enhanced to be able simultaneously to decode two 1080p HD video streams and to be able to display HD video in high quality with Windows Aero mode enabled. HDMI capability has also been upgraded to HDMI 1.3a with Dolby TrueHD and DTS-HD Master Audio support.

The SAPPHIRE HD 5000 series is supported by AMD's DirectX 11 WHQL certified graphics driver which delivers support for all of the key DirectX 11 level features required for new gaming experiences and acceleration of next generation high performance applications.

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