HIS HD 6670 1GB DDR3 Graphics Card

AMD has made a name for itself when it comes to mainstream cards and they continue to deliver great performance with every generation. We had the HD 4670, which was the crowd favourite in the sub-5K price bracket and now the HD 5670 follows the same league. Their 6000 series is their current line up and today we’ll be taking a look at the HD 6670 from HIS. We’ve already seen the HD 6670 in action from the likes of Asus and XFX, so let’s see what HIS has to bring to the table.

Design and Build
HIS has gone with their own design for the PCB and the cooler just like XFX and Asus. There are many variants of the HD 6670 and HIS has sent us their 1GB GDDR3 version. The Asus card that we tested had 1GB GDDR5, so on paper that should be faster than the one we have today - we’ll find out soon enough. The card itself is quite small and compact and will easily fit into even a small case. The cooler protrudes outwards a bit, so it might be a tight squeeze for a smaller HTPC box. Plus, the card will take up two slots in your system.

Good build and design

The aluminium heatsink only covers the core and not the memory chips. It’s fairly small and light weight, but that’s enough to cool the card. The translucent fan is sufficiently large to move good volumes of air without being too noisy.

Eyefinity support for up to three monitors

For connectivity, we have DVI-D, VGA and HDMI connectors. There isn’t any DP present, which is not a big deal really. The bundle only includes some instruction manual and the driver disk.  There aren’t any adapters present since all the ports are present directly on the card.

Features
The card follows the reference specification set by AMD. The core runs at 800MHz whereas the memory is set to 1600MHz. The 1GB GDDR3 memory utilizes a 128-bit memory bus, which is not uncommon for a mainstream card. 1GB may seem a bit excessive in this case since lower end cards aren’t really powerful enough to render highly complex graphics, so having this extra frame buffer usually makes little to no difference. The card does not support CrossFire, but it can do a three monitor Eyefinity setup.

It will occupy two slots in your cabinet

AMD recommends a 400W PSU to run this card properly. Also, since there’s no extra power connector (just like the HD5670) all the power is drawn from the motherboards PCI-E slot. The TDP of the card is somewhere around 60W, which is again very similar to its predecessor, the HD 5670. Next, let’s have a look at the performance and see how it compares against Asus’s GDDR5 version.

Test Rig Specifications

• Processor: Intel Core i7-2600K CPU @ 3.40 GHz
• Motherboard: GIGABYTE P67A-UD3R
• Memory: Corsair Dominator GT 6 GB DDR3 (3 x 2 GB)
• Hard drive: WD Velociraptor  300 GB
• GPU: HIS HD 6670 1GB DDR3
• PSU: Cooler Master Silent Pro 1000W

Performance
Even though both the cards have 1GB of memory, the use of GDDR5 in the Asus card makes a huge difference in real world games. There’s almost a 48 percent difference in Resident Evil 5 and an even bigger one in 3DMark Vantage. The same goes for the other games, as well.

The GDDR3 memory is hurting it's performance

Throughout the benchmarks, the card ran silently without making a sound. This is good if you are looking to build an HTPC for your living room. The aluminum heatsink and fan were easily able to keep up with the rising temperature, even when stressed. We used three loops of the Heaven Benchmark and recorded the temperature using GPUz. On idle, the HD 6670 recorded a temperature of 35 degree C and when stressed went up to 45 degree C.

Performance is not looking too good

These are really good temperatures, which show the larger cooler coupled with the fan does a good enough job of cooling the card. The fan speed was set to auto for the test and never went beyond 40 percent.

Verdict
The street price of the HIS HD 6670 is Rs .5,250, which makes it cheaper than the Asus HD 6670, but not by much. Between the two, I would have to go with Asus’s offering mainly for the GDDR5 memory. If cheap is what you’re after, then you should look out for the 512MB version of this card or better still XFX’s HD 6670, which uses the same 1GB GDDR3 memory but at just Rs.4,399. HIS has a good card on their hands, but the pricing seems a little high for what you’re getting. The mainstream segment is already jam packed with plenty of options and it all comes down to pricing, mess that up and you might as well forget about it.