StarCraft II and multimedia usage
StarCraft II: Wings of Liberty is a sequel that improves on the original with an excellent campaign mode, incredible cut scenes and a multiplayer experience that never seems to grow old. Real-time-strategy games don't come much better than this.
We're still miffed why AMD's drivers are so comparatively slow in StarCraft II.
Multimedia
Gaming performance is adequate, then, and our benchmarks show it's possible to gain an extra 25 per cent by switching out to an active-cooled card.
However, gaming isn't the card's forte. Put it inside an HTPC box and it'll make a near-silent PC if paired up correctly with low-noise components.
Radeon HD 6670 incorporates the video-processing UVD 3.0 block found in AMD's newest APUs. Appreciating that a potent Core i5 2500K chip was used, running the Blu-ray version of X-Men: The Last Stand we observed average CPU utilisation of 6.8 per cent over a two-minute clip. Similarly, running the Speed 1080p clip on YouTube provided an average CPU load of 4.3 per cent.
Tapping into the power of the GPU for HTML5 graphics, the card managed a solid 25fps in the 2000-fish Fishbowl benchmark under IE 9, with average CPU usage hovering at 15 per cent. In the proper multimedia cases the maximum temperature recorded was 53°C, though it scaled to 75°C with the taxing Fishbowl benchmark.
