5500 Series and 5450 Pre-Announcement

Along with today’s launch, AMD is also pre-announcing the 5500 series and the 5450. We say pre-announcing as they’re not launching the cards today, nor are they showing off the complete specifications of the cards. Today is an announcement of what they’ll be launching in February, the 6th and final month in their 6 month 4 chip launch window for the Evergreen family.

We’ll start with the 5500 series. There is one card pre-announced thus far, which we expect will get a real name (e.g. 5570) at launch. The 5500 series is specified for less than 50W load power, and will be a low-profile actively cooled card. In a full-height computer, a 3rd display output port can be attached, giving the card the ability to drive 3 monitors in an Eyefinity configuration.

The other card is the 5450, which is another low-profile card, but this time passively cooled. It too can drive 3 monitors in Eyefinity mode when put in a full-sized case to allow a 3rd display output. We don’t know what the power usage is, beyond the fact that AMD is calling it an “ultra low power” card.

Both of these cards will have the full 5000 series feature set, most importantly including audio bitstreaming. This should make either of these cards the great HTPC card we’ve been expecting to come out of the 5000 series, depending on how much rendering power you need.

As we stated before, both of these cards will be launching sometime in February. We do know more about these cards, but at this point we’re not allowed to talk about them. What we can suggest is that you look at our Mobility Radeon 5000 article, where AMD announced Redwood and Cedar in mobile form ahead of the desktop cards, and then take a very close look at this slide of AMD’s chip stack. The astute among you should be able to infer some additional information about these forthcoming cards.

Meet The 5670 The Test
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  • krumme - Thursday, January 14, 2010 - link

    KO 1 round
  • Shadowmaster625 - Thursday, January 14, 2010 - link

    Where is the 4770 and 9800GT??? A lot of the the data makes me skeptical because it doesnt mesh with what I'm seeing on other sites. I'm more inclined to trust the other reviews because they used common sense and compared this card to more cards in its own price range. Common sense is your friend. Notice how close the 5670 and 5750 are in terms of load power. That dont make sense at all.
  • Ryan Smith - Thursday, January 14, 2010 - link

    The 9800 GT is the same as an 8800 GT. As for the 4770 it's here too, although I don't have any 19x12 data for it since that resolution was a last-minute decision (I only had 30 hours or so with the 5670).
  • ereavis - Thursday, January 14, 2010 - link

    Common sense dictates that if a 4770 performs like a 4850 clone in most cases, leave it out for saturation purposes. Same case for the 9800GT, GTS 250 is a rebranded 9800GT, near identical performance.
    Price point? 9800GT and 4770 are next-to-unavailable, so what price should be used on something that can't be bought (in the near future when 5670 is all that's left on ATI side and GT 250 for nVidia but this review is still sitting on this site).

    How can a power meters measured numbers "not make sense"? A much better performing 5750 at near 5670 power usage just means inefficiency at 5670 performance, which is common for lower performance parts on similar fab.

    Explanation of the above would be a bonus, but hardly required, great review.
  • daytrader7 - Thursday, January 14, 2010 - link

    4850's for 99 bucks a pair?

    Methinks not.
  • silverblue - Thursday, January 14, 2010 - link

    No I think he meant that he'd seen a couple of instances where a 4850 was priced as low as $99, not that it costs $99 to have two of them.

    If it only cost that, hell I'd import two myself.
  • daytrader7 - Thursday, January 14, 2010 - link

    Ahh...

    2 different 4850's available @ 99.00 each.

    Misinterpretation on my part.

  • Zool - Thursday, January 14, 2010 - link

    Also want to note that without real nvidia cards for amd it seems enough just to beat the weak nvidia setup and thats all.
    Eyfinity is just plain stupid on these level of cards for games. Real DX11 games on these performance levels is questionable at least too.
    Both 5700 and 5600 are VERY weak for the price they sell. I wouldnt recomend them to anyone if they own a 4800 or 4600 series card, just in case they need a new card in a new machine.
    The feature set with new generation of cards, including audio bitstreaming should be a MUST and not a priced upgrade put in the cards cost. Iam quite dissapointed form the amd-s 5600 and 5700 series cards. The only real new cards are the radeon 5800-s.
  • MadMan007 - Thursday, January 14, 2010 - link

    I agree with Zool. The 5800s are the only true advancement among this 5000 series. They actually improved performance and price/performance (well, until pricing got out of hand because of supply) over their equivalent lineup predecessors and against their competition from NV. The 5700s and apparently 5600s are just spinning wheels performance-wise: they are feature upgrades not performance upgrades. That makes them mildly disappointing and not an easy purchase decision.
  • marc1000 - Friday, January 15, 2010 - link

    I had a 3850. Buying a 5770 was a fairly easy decision to me. I wanted the 5850 in fact, but to buy this one I would need to change my PSU too and that would be too expensive. So the 5770 it was! And I'm pretty glad with the performance. Remember that not everyone has the latest board from previus generation. ATI/AMD is doing a great job.

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