Final thoughts and rating

Sapphire retails a standard Radeon HD 5670 1GB card for £85. Add another £40 and a more-potent HD 5770 1GB can be yours, leading to gaming performance which is 50 per cent higher. However, the HD 5670's thermal envelope is such that it can be passively cooled by a well-implemented zero-fan heatsink, and this is precisely what Sapphire has done with the Ultimate version of the GPU.

Offering reasonable performance in the latest games at a 1,920x1,080 setting and outfitted with an Eyefinity-forming selection of ports on the back, Sapphire's retail partners charge a £15 premium for the zero-fan model. We like the fact that it paves the way for an ultra-quiet PC that can, within reason, do it all, and the frugal nature of mid-range componentry is such that gaming power consumption doesn't exceed 150W all in.

There's no astonishingly new technology at play with the Sapphire HD 5670 1GB Ultimate card, folks. Rather, it does exactly what it says on box, and you'll never know it's in the machine. Like good children, the Sapphire card can be seen but not heard.

The Good

No fans
Low-ish temps
Decent outputs

The Bad

£25 more will buy you a 50 per cent hike in gaming performance, albeit via an actively-cooled card
Protruding heatsink gets awfully close to some coolers

HEXUS Rating

Sapphire Radeon HD 5670 1GB Ultimate

HEXUS Rating

Sapphire Radeon HD 5670 1GB Ultimate

HEXUS Where2Buy

The Sapphire Radeon HD 5670 1GB Ultimate graphics card can be purchased from Play.com at a cost of £99.99.

HEXUS Right2Reply

At HEXUS, we invite the companies whose products we test to comment on our articles. If any company representatives for the products reviewed choose to respond, we'll publish their commentary here verbatim.

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Certainly the best HTPC card for me, I've been waiting for something like this before I started to build my HTPC.

Personally I think the AMD 785G chipset is the best for a HTPC, being based on the ATI 4200 it doesn't do much for gaming but has the features on the better cards when it comes to video decoding etc.

With that for a HTPC with mild gaming in mind this does look quite good.

Very tempting, but I wonder if the performance of this card is enough of a jump over my current passive XFX Radeon 4650 to justify the price, and I have my concerns about connecting a dual-monitor setup with 1 via DVI/hdmi and 1 via VGA…

I had the previous version of this card, a 4670 passive, which looks like it had an identical heatsink.

A nice card, but beware, the heatsink makes it unsuitable for many HTPC enclosures. Wouldn't fit in my Antec Fusion, couldn't get the lid back on ;)

hmm other post was deleted, maybe too negative, sorry
as its touted as a HTPC review could we please get benchmarks for HTPC tasks like video playback etc. ? and compare against other HTPC focused cards, the market for these types of cards rarely picks em out for gaming :)