Sixteen months ago we looked at the Mainstream segment from the Radeon 5000 series. This looked at the low-end segment in that product family, specifically the Radeon HD 5670, HD 5550 and HD 5450. My "final thoughts" in that review was, "If you have any interest in Eyefinity, or game in anything more than a cursory fashion, I would recommend the upgrade to the 5700-series. The one downside of the 5700-series is that it does require a power connection from the PSU. It would be nice to get the 5700-series performance in low-power card. Maybe next generation".
With the Radeon HD 6000 series, we're now in that "next generation", and we can now see if we can get solid 1080p gaming from a card that doesn't require an external power connection.
Architecture & Specs
The Mainstream segment has significantly smaller feature sets, Shaders, transistor counts and power draws. None of the cards in the Mainstream segment require additional power from the PSU.
Below is a spec block with outlining the specs from the Radeon 6790 all the way through the 5450. I've also included specs for two of AMD's new APUs, which have graphics cores that fall within the Mainstream specs.
| Card | GPUs | Transistors | Memory | Shaders | Clock (MHz) | TDP (Watts) | MSRP* | ||
| Core | Mem | Idle | Max | ||||||
| AMD Radeon HD 6790 | 1 | 1.7B | 1GB | 800 | 840 | 1050 | 19 | 150 | $149 |
| AMD Radeon HD 6670 | 1 | 716M | 1GB | 480 | 800 | 1000 | 12 | 66 | $99 |
| AMD Radeon HD 6570 | 1 | 716M | 512MB | 480 | 650 | 900 | 10 | 44 | $79 |
| AMD A8-3850 APU (HD 6550) | 1 | 1GB | 400 | 600 | 800 | 100W (APU Total) | $134 | ||
| AMD Radeon HD 6450 | 1 | 370M | 512MB | 160 | 750 | 900 | 9 | 27 | $54 |
| AMD E-350 APU (HD 6310) | 1 | 1GB | 80 | 492 | 533 | 18W (APU Total) | OEM | ||
| ATI Radeon HD 5770 | 1 | 1.04B | 1GB | 800 | 850 | 1200 | 18 | 108 | $129 |
| ATI Radeon HD 5750 | 1 | 1.04B | 1GB | 720 | 700 | 1150 | 16 | 86 | $134 |
| ATI Radeon HD 5670 | 1 | 627M | 1GB | 400 | 775 | 1000 | 14 | 61 | $109 |
| ATI Radeon HD 5550 | 1 | 627M | 1GB | 320 | 550 | 800 | 9 | 40 | $74 |
| ATI Radeon HD 5450 | 1 | 292M | 1GB | 80 | 650 | 800 | 6.4 | 19 | $54 |
Installation & Comparison
Here are two pics showing the HD 6670 and HD 6570 installed next to an HD 6970. Both low-profile cards are diminutive next to the flagship single-GPU card.
Note
I've decided to try opening comments on this review, to see how it goes. Comments will only be visible on the first page.
