Final thoughts and rating
The release of three mainstream graphics cards marks an almost-complete transition to the Radeon HD 6000 series for AMD. Previously available in OEM form for large system builders since February, AMD's HD 6450, HD 6570 and HD 6670 are incremental upgrades over roughly equivalent 5-series GPUs launched up to 18 months ago.
Comparing the series, a smattering of extra performance is sweetened by an expanded multimedia feature-set that's present on all 6K cards, but it's clearly not enough of an incentive to throw away relative recent technology in favour of the new Turks- and Caicos-based cards.
Rather, AMD is positioning the trio of sub-£80 discrete boards as ideal upgrades from (at least) two-year-old technology - which is DX10, at best - or either past or present integrated graphics. This line of thinking makes sense, more so if you invest in an HD 6570 or HD 6670.
Turning our attention toward the el-cheapo HD 6450, due to debut from £35, it's far more suited as a facilitator of multi-screen and multimedia technology than a gaming card. Medium-quality settings trip it up at a 1080p resolution, so while fine for the casual gamer, readers who play fast-paced games need to look further up the stack.
The reviewed HD 6670, priced at around £75, has enough grunt to run games at medium/high settings with a 720p resolution and medium settings at 1080p. It's some 10 per cent faster than the last-gen HD 5670 but, just as importantly, up to 50 per cent slower than an HD 5770 - a GPU that costs £20 extra. Presenting a reasonable mix of gaming and multimedia performance, the HD 6670 is a solid bet if upgrading from an IGP or low-end card from, say, 2009.
NVIDIA is yet to fully reveal its mainstream GeForce 5xx range of GPUs, which is likely to happen this summer, so if you're currently looking for a modern, feature-rich graphics card that's particularly suited for an HTPC, and don't want or need to break the bank, you could do a lot worse than AMD's new 6-series GPUs, especially as the company will be phasing out mainstream incumbent Radeon 5-series stock in the coming weeks.
We'll be looking at the multimedia performance in a separate review, but going by the numbers, the two reviewed Radeons make reasonable cases as upgrade cards.
The Good
Faster and better specified than last generation
Trio of new cards can be passively cooled by partners
The Bad
Gains over last-gen cards are incremental
Price-trashing of said last-gen cards will diminish the new Radeons' appeal
HEXUS Rating
AMD Radeon HD 6450 1GB and HD 6670 1GB
HEXUS Where2Buy
TBC.
HEXUS Right2Reply
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