When a new GPU lineup is rolled out you can expect to see quite a few variations on the design over the coming months as the chip designer wants to maximize their earning potentials, which also means you’re likely to find something within your budget as well.

AMD’s Radeon HD 5570 sports the same great core features the rest of the 5000 lineup is endowed with but its slimmed down processing capabilities means you won’t be paying as much for the advanced features.

Here’s a roundup of reviews from around the web:

• AMD’s Radeon HD 5570: Low Profile, Higher Performance – AnandTech
• AMD’s ATI Radeon HD 5570 Video Card Review – HardOCP
• ATI Radeon HD 5570: Affordable DX11 GPU – Hot Hardware
• ATI Radeon HD 5450 & HD 5570 Graphics Cards – SilentPCReview
• ATI Radeon HD 5570 Review – TechSpot

ATI’s Theater 200 chipset was a popular video-in/video-out choice for ATI-based graphics cards, unfortunately support for it has seemingly vanished in the latest driver releases from the company. Thankfully some digging around has lead to working drivers that support Windows 7 and Vista 32bit and 64bit versions.

The drivers support ATI T200 AVStream chips bearing the following device IDs:

ntativrv01, ntativrv02, ntativrv03

You can download the drivers below:

AMD ATI T200 AVStream Windows 7, Vista Driver Version 6.14.10.1095

While there’s a huge benefit to the top-end of the market once a new GPU hits the street there’s an equally large performance boost to the mid-range and low-end graphics cards based on the newest cores.

Testseek Labs has a look at the AMD Radeon HD 5670 graphics card which promises a good performance jump over last generation and an especially interesting feature set for the HTPC crowd:

The Radeon HD 5670 actually turns out to be even more powerful in the first batch of games that I had expected based on the results achieved in the benchmarking tests. I was actually somewhat surprised that this medium range card, at a price level below $100, could move these games with great fluidity.

A solid upgrade for those old power-hungry graphics cards.

When a new graphics chip lineup is launched there’s usually quite a few chips that aren’t quite up to the task for running at the insanely high speeds of the top end so they do a bit of tinkering and make them suitable for the lower end of the market. It might seem a little deceptive but hey you’re getting quite a bit of performance from less expensive chips.

Sapphire’s Radeon HD 5750 won’t dent your pocket very much and, for the price, it features  speedy results in many of today’s latest and greatest gaming titles. Techgage runs it through its paces:

In addition, the HD 5750, though a “budget” offering, lacks nothing of what makes the HD 5000 series so great. That means there’s full support for DirectX 11, Eyefinity (multi-monitor), multiple video outputs and so forth. From a features standpoint, it’s all here. What’s lacking is of course the incredible performance of the larger cards. Both the HD 5750 and HD 5770 have had their memory bus downgraded to 128-bit, while at the same time, they lose a substantial number of shader cores (exactly half of the 58×0 for each respective model).

While there’s plenty of competition in its segment its lower power consumption and advanced feature set makes it the more intriguing choice.

The last few years have seen the high end of the graphics card market dedicated to multi-GPU solutions. While a single high-end GPU on a graphics card is quite speedy two chips on a single graphics card make things even more interesting, especially when they also offer up multiple GPU connections.

The AMD Radeon HD 5970 sports a pair of specially selected graphics chips clocked slightly lower than the 5870 GPU but the company fully expects you to overclock to your heart’s content…as long as you have a power supply capable of keeping up with the increased power requirements.

Here are a few of the reviews making their way around the web:

The Radeon HD 5970: Completing AMD’s Takeover of the High End GPU Market – AnandTech
AMD ATI Radeon HD 5970 Video Card Review – HardOCP
AMD ATI Radeon HD 5970 2,048MB graphics card: usurper of the throne – Hexus
ATI Radeon HD 5970 Dual-GPU Powerhouse Review – HotHardware
ATI Radeon HD 5970 Dual-GPU Video Card Review – Legit Reviews
AMD Radeon HD 5970 2GB Review – PC Perspective

Constantly aiming for the high-end has some unintended effects on your PC. That top of the line card is going to want a new power supply to keep it happy and an appropriate processor and memory to keep it busy with new information to render. Perhaps shooting a little lower will save you some cash in the long run.

The Asus Radeon HD 5850 is a mid-range product but it’s no slouch when it comes to performance. Testseek Labs has a review of the card and how it handles the usual gaming duties:

Asus hasn’t added any physical alternations on this card; it is basically Asus’ version of the generic AMD 5850. However Asus has a series of software tools which help us overclockers to reach the maximum potential of this card; the “Gamer OSD” and “Smart Doctor”. This last application will be most useful since it allows us to play with the voltage of the core.

Voltage tweaking is certainly a benefit for those that enjoy a bit of the overclocking but you’re going to want an add-on cooler for that.

There was a time when you’d have to stick to one of the two graphics chips makers in case you wanted, some day, the Multi-GPU upgrade option. Heck you even had to stay within the same card generation, same specs as well, if you wanted that sweet sweet frame rate boost two graphics cards offered. That’s no longer the case.

The Lucid Hydra 200 chip is designed to take any supported graphics card and allow you to pair it up with the competition’s graphics cards with some interesting scaling results. HotHardware has a few test cases:

We tested the graphics cards in this article using a unique setup provided by Lucid. The main components consist of a Gigabyte GA-EX58-UD3R motherboard powered by Intel’s Core i7 920 quad-core processor and 2GB of OCZ DDR3 RAM. Of course, this particular motherboard does not feature Lucid technology so as a result, the graphics cards were installed on a special evaluation board featuring the Hydra 200 chip. The evaluation board was connected via PCIe card installed on an x16 slot on the GA-EX58-UD3R motherboard. We were told that this test setup simulates the performance of the Hydra 200 when integrated on a mainboard.

It’s not final and hasn’t been integrated into a motherboard yet but the performance it’s pumping out is highly impressive and should be on most gamer’s want lists, and high end motherboards, in short order.

If you were wondering when the latest, monthly, ATI Catalyst drivers would be released well you had a bit of a wait this month as AMD chose to push them out on Microsoft’s Windows 7 launch date. In the latest 9.10 driver set you can expect quite a few performance improvements and bug fixes as well as support for the newest ATI Radeon HD 5870 and 5850 graphics cards. Unfortunately Radeon HD 5770 and 5750 support didn’t make it in but those cards should see support shortly in the form of a hotfixed driver.

If you’re running a Radeon graphics card earlier than the Radeon HD 2400 series you’ll have to grab the company’s legacy drivers as earlier generations of their graphics chips have been moved to legacy support status.

Here are some quick links to AMD’s download pages:

ATI Catalyst 9.10 Video Drivers for Windows 7
ATI Catalyst 9.10 Video Drivers for Windows 7 64-bit
ATI Catalyst 9.10 Video Drivers for Windows Vista
ATI Catalyst 9.10 Video Drivers for Windows Vista 64-bit
ATI Catalyst 9.10 Video Drivers for Windows XP
ATI Catalyst 9.10 Video Drivers for Windows XP 64-bit

While the ATI Radeon HD 5770 triple CrossFireX testing that was recently attempted does make a good case for going with the value approach it would seem that taking on the same endeavor with ATI’s latest and greatest graphics cards is just as exciting and visually stunning.

PC Perspective slapped together three ATI Radeon HD 5870 video cards for some insanely high-end testing. It’s impressive:

A trend that I think you will see repeated throughout our CrossFireX testing today is that adding in that third card really won’t be making a big difference until you hit that 2560×1600 resolution.  Here in Batman: Arkham Asylum, you’ll see at 1680×1050 we saw a 71% performance boost adding in the second Radeon HD 5870, we only saw an additional 15% performance gain adding in the third.  At 2560×1600 that changes a bit: 84% boost moving to two cards and a healthy 43% performance increase adding in that final card.

Topping 150 frames per second on a single display bodes well for those Eyefinity gaming seekers, once they have that capability working of course.

While the ATI Radeon HD 5770 presents a solid mid-range performance gaming experience there is that often overlooked benefit that a multiple GPU environment brings in. Thankfully there are those dedicated enough to test such technology.

Guru3D has tested the Radeon HD 5770 in a three card CrossFireX setup which may seem a bit excessive but the performance benefits are there:

Obviously rendering your games with three GPUs equals a lot of brute horsepower, so big that the rest of the PC might become a bottleneck for your graphics solution. That is however a luxury problem though but as an example, Fallout 3 at 8x AA at 1920×1200 performed as well as a 2-way 5770 setup as the processor (Core i7 @ 3.75 GHz) was literally holding back the GPUs from reaching the stratosphere.

When your gaming performance is held back by such a powerful processor it’s a good problem to have.