AMD Radeon HD 6570 Pro Reviews

Its sub-$80 price makes the AMD Radeon HD 6570 an attractive alternative to integrated graphics, but its gaming skills are too weak to easily seal the deal.

For now, the new Radeon HD 6570 and HD 6670 are evolutionary products that bring virtually all of the features of AMD’s excellent Radeon HD 6000 series down to sub-$100 price points. They’re also quite power friendly and quiet, and would make excellent cards for HTPC applications. If you’re on a budget and live-and-die by framerates though, there’s more performance to be had for similar or slightly more money.

In summary, if you are looking for a video card in the USD 75 price range, your best bet today is the Radeon HD 6570, which can be way faster than the GeForce GT 440. Of course, there are better video cards if you have more money available. But, for the occasional gamer who doesn’t mind lowering video quality settings and playing at lower resolutions, the new Radeon HD 6570 fits the bill.

In the end the AMD Radeon HD 6670 and HD 6570 are solid additions to an already crowded budget graphics card market. They definitely improve on the already solid performance and feature set of the Radeon HD 5600-series of cards and do so at the same launch-time price points. The problem that both of these cards have (and that many graphics releases are seeing recently) is the price merges that occur when higher performance, older GPUs go on sale or offer rebates to take a step down in market. The GTS 450 and HD 5770 both can sometime be had for under $100 and easily outperform the brand new $99 HD 6670.

The best qualities of both cards are that they’re low-profile cards that don’t need an external power source, and that this is a reference quality we should see in partner cards. With the exception of a couple of one-off non-reference designs like the much more expensive PowerColor Go Green 5750, the 6670 and 6570 are going to be the fastest cards available that don’t require external power. In the OEM market that AMD sold these cards to first, that’s a significant advantage. For the retail market however this is only of particular use for HTPC users that need a bit more gaming horsepwer. For every other use in this price segment, time will tell if it is enough. Ultimately Turks and the 6670/6570 are technically superior, but at $99 and $79 respectively they won’t have that same superior position on the open market.