Sapphire launches passively-cooled HD 5670 card

Quietly does it

Graphics card outfit Sapphire Technology has introduced an HD 5670 equipped with a totally silent heatpipe cooler.

The Sapphire HD 5670 Ultimate boasts all the features of a regular 5670 - 400 Stream processors, 1GB DDR5 memory, clocked at 775MHz core and 1000MHz (4GHz effective) - and is claimed to deliver the same performance as fan cooled models, but is passively cooled.

The output configuration on the bracket is Dual-Link DVI, HDMI and DisplayPort. In addition to a DVI to VGA adapter, an HDMI to DVI adapter is included, allowing two DVI monitors to be supported.

The HD 5670 supports up to three monitors in ATI Eyefinity mode with a suitable DisplayPort monitor or active-display adapter. Native CrossFire support allows two or more cards to be used together for additional performance on a suitable CrossFireX-compatible motherboard.

As the core technology is low power, no external power connection is required.

Sapphire says all of its HD 5000 series cards have enhanced UVD which is able to simultaneously decode two 1080p HD video streams and can display HD video with Windows Aero mode enabled.

HDMI capability has also been upgraded to HDMI 1.3a with Dolby TrueHD and DTS-HD Master Audio.

This series of cards are, of course, DirectX 11 compliant, with features such DirectCompute 11 instructions, hardware Tessellation and multi-threaded communications with the system CPU.

The passive card hasn't been priced up yet but is likely to sell for around £120.