As AMD’s 28nm allocation has improved so has the selection of cards available on the market. We’re still in the first phase of the Radeon HD 7000 series rollout, with AMD’s partners building semi-custom cards based on AMD’s reference PCB, but even without custom PCBs AMD’s partners have been able to turn out a number of interesting designs. This is particularly the case for the 7800 series, where prices are high enough for partners to experiment with different coolers and TDPs are low enough to allow more than a handful of approaches.

Last month we saw some of those first designs with PowerColor’s PCS+ HD7870 and HIS’s IceQ 7870 Turbo, and today we’ll be looking at a third: Sapphire’s HD 7870 Overclock Edition, their semi-custom factory overclocked 7870. How does Sapphire’s dual-fan entry stand up to the competition? Let’s find out.

Announced late last month and shipping 3 weeks ago, AMD kicked off the 28nm generation with a bang with their Radeon HD 7970. Combining TSMC’s new 28nm HKMG process with AMD’s equally new Graphics Core Next Architecture, AMD finally took back the single-GPU performance crown for the first time since 2010 with an all-around impressive flagship video card.

Of course AMD has always produced multiple video cards from their high-end GPUs, and with Tahiti this was no different. The second Tahiti card has been waiting in the wings for its own launch, and that launch has finally come. Today AMD is launching the Radeon HD 7950, the cooler, quieter, and cheaper sibling of the Radeon HD 7970. Aimed right at NVIDIA’s GeForce GTX 580, AMD is looking to sew up the high-end market, and as we’ll see the Radeon HD 7950 is exactly the card to accomplish that.

The popularity of Intel's HD Graphics amongst HTPC enthusiasts and the success of the AMD APUs seem to indicate that the days of the discrete HTPC GPU are numbered. However, for those with legacy systems, a discrete HTPC GPU will probably be the only way to enable hardware accelerated HD playback.

In this context, both AMD and NVIDIA have been serving the market with their low end GPUs. These GPUs are preferable for HTPC scenarios due to their low power consumption and ability to be passively cooled. Today, we will be taking a look at four GPUs, two each from AMD (6450 and 6570) and NVIDIA (GT 430 and GT 520), for which passively cooled solutions exist in the market.

Gaming benchmarks are not of much interest to the HTPC user interested in a passively cooled solution, and those will not be presented. Instead, there will take a quick look at the specs of the four cards and a presentation of the HQV benchmarks. We will then see how the cards handle custom refresh rates and fare at deinterlacing. After this, we will proceed to identify a benchmark for evaluating HTPC GPUs and see how the cards fare in the benchmark. We will see how one of the cards springs a surprise and analyze the cause.
Towards the end, we will have a couple of sections to cover some developments in the area of open source software for HTPCs.

Read on to find out which discrete GPU fits your usage scenario and how to tweak it for a good HTPC experience.

Fans of custom video cards have undoubtedly found themselves a bit disappointed with the Radeon HD 5800 series. Due to a perfect storm of low GPU yields from TSMC and NVIDIA’s late arrival with the GTX 400 series, the first 6 months for the 5800 series was nothing other than bonkers. AMD was selling GPUs to their partners as fast as they could come out of TSMC, and their partners were selling finished boards to OEMs and-end users alike as fast as they could be assembled. Even at prices over MSRP, the 5800 series flew off the shelves, leaving AMD’s partners with little-to-no supply of GPUs to tinker with. Custom 5800 series cards effectively took a 6 month vacation.

That wait finally came to an end in the Spring of 2010, as an increase in GPU supplies allowed AMD’s partners to catch their breathes and focus on their custom cards. With 6 months under their belts AMD’s partners were able to come up with a variety of designs for their custom cards, and today we’re going to be looking at a trio of custom Radeon HD 5870s: Sapphire’s Radeon HD 5870 Toxic 2GB, MSI’s Radeon HD 5870 Lightning, and Gigabyte’s Radeon HD 5870 Super Overclock.