Specifications and features
So then ATI today will release their most budget gaming graphics card. With a price tag of 69 USD / 55 EUR. today ATI is launching their most low-cost graphics cards in the 5000 range that allows some 'ok' gaming.

The chip under the hood of the card is a derivative of of the GPU developed under ASIC codename Redwood and if we dig a little deeper, this would is the same RV830 GPU used in the 5600 series with the mere difference being the choice in memory and memory bandwidth (gDDR5 on 5600 and gDDR3/2 in 5500 series).

Though not a lot, anno 2010 the card definitely packs some boom-boom-pow as the Black Eyed Peas would love to say it. See the 5450 released last week had only 80 shader processors, which  has very little to do with gaming in the year 2010. But the 5570 in fact packs five times more performance thanks to it's 400 shader processors.

It's certainly a diverse graphics card. The reference sample we received already has three monitor outputs, that offers flexibility. Armed with Eyefinity support you can drive up-to 3 monitors simultaneously as well, and sure again .. not Eyefinity gaming, but for desktop and workstation usage or a nice presentation it will suffice really well.

So we determined that the Radeon HD 5570 has 400 Stream processors, to reflect that number; the most high-end Single GPU from ATI has 1600 of em and the slowest has 80 of them. Quite a difference. But the 400 Shader processors can still be used to play a game or two and in assist several compute based applications, it can speed up your Flash animations, help along with video transcoding but most of all the 400 Shader processors can be utilized with software like Media player Classic HT to optimize image quality (post process) with better colors, depth and image sharpening. We'll show you that in this article.

The card also embeds the updated UVD 2.0 engine to fully help accelerate and decode high-definition content like Blu-ray. We'll talk about UVD 2.0 in a minute though. Let's sift through a comparison.

As you can see, power consumption wise these puppies are going to shine, not even a 6-pin power cable connector is needed as the peak wattages are well below the 75 Watt PCIe slot limitation. The maximum wattage (TDP) is just 43 Watts and when the card is idling it will use up only 10W of power thanks to many clever power saving scheme's and well, the lack of huge numbers of transistors.