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Overclocking
Now we've seen what our Sapphire Radeon HD 5570 is capable of at stock speeds, let's take a look at what kind of overclocking potential this board holds for anyone looking to squeeze a few extra frames per second out of their budget purchase.
With its diminutive form factor and tiny single slot cooler, it's logical not to expect too much of this kind of card in overclocking terms, and our final overclocks were indeed rather modest, with both our GPU core and memory clocks left with a small but still notable 40MHz increase. This gives us a final core clock speed of 690MHz, while our 1GB of GDDR3 memory was left with a new clock speed of 940MHz.
With these clock speeds in place, let's see how performance is improved in a couple of our real-world game titles at 1280x720 with 4x anti-aliasing and 16x anisotropic filtering applied.
A respectable 6% performance increase is passed our way by these clock speed boosts in Enemy Territory: Quake Wars.
Left 4 Dead 2 on the other hand seems curiously bereft of any such performance increases - This isn't the first time we've seen this state of affairs from this particular title, but it still manages to surprise us every time.
Video playback
Let's now briefly examine the High Definition video playback capabilities of the Sapphire Radeon HD 5570, and the UVD video processing engine which it houses. To do this, we've monitored CPU utilisation while playing back a couple of Blu-Ray movies at 1920x1080 (1080p) on our test system, using the latest build of PowerDVD 9 Ultra with ATI's AVIVO technology enabled within the application.
Given that both Radeon HD 5570 and 5670 use the same GPU core, it's no shock to see near identical GPU utilisation figures during Blu-Ray playback, as both boards take almost the entire playback workload away from the CPU.
The CPU takes on a marginal increase in workload when handling the decoding of two High Definition streams, but not to any notable degree, as our two graphics boards here continue to do all of the real hard work when it comes to Blu-Ray playback.
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