The half-height graphics card segment doesn’t get much respect. It has to toil away with rather weak GPU offerings because space issues make decent cooling solutions pretty much impossible and the power supplies in such PCs are generally underpowered anyway.

The HIS Radeon HD 5570 brings impressive graphics performance to the form factor allowing for some decent gaming to be done. Hardware Secrets has the review:

HIS Radeon HD 5570 Fan, part number H557F1G, runs at the default clock rates set by AMD. As you can see on the pictures below it is a half-height video card. You can transform it into a “slim” (“half-height”) video card to be installed in small form factor (SFF) cases using the I/O brackets that come with the product.

A nice solution if you’re stuck in the restrictive confines many PC manufacturers impose on unwitting buyers.

There’s something to be said about custom cooling configurations. The base models most chip manufacturers ship with their creations do the minimum amount of work with the maximum amount of noise output imaginable.

MSI’s HD 5870 Lightning graphics card does away with the reference cooler in favor of a dual fan design that looks more than up to the task of cooling the Radeon HD 5870 it houses. techPowerUp has the review:

When looking at the PCB design, it becomes clear that MSI has gone long ways to improve the AMD reference design for extra overclocking potential. The included SSC coils work without emitting any coil noise, and the added number of PWM phases will help in situations that require large amounts of power fed to the GPU. But it seems to me that during normal use and during overclocking with the stock cooler, these features seem to make little difference.

A performance tailored card with plenty of features enthusiasts are looking for and a hefty amount of cooling performance.

The majority of graphics chips tend to go from cradle to grave housed in the same PCB design the chip manufacturer created for it. There’s very little incentive to create something new unless there are obvious cost or performance benefits.

The Sapphire Radeon HD 5850 Toxic Edition fancies itself a performance option with its new fangled cooling and new PCB design. AnandTech has the review:

With that in mind, we were able to use the AMD GPU Clock Tool to push our card by a further 130MHz on the core to 895MHz, and an additional 50MHz on the memory to 1175MHz. This is 17% core overclock and 4% memory overclock respectively. Thus unlike the already overclocked Toxic card, the games that will respond the best here are those that are GPU limited instead of memory bandwidth limited.

A good nudge on the overclocking front and it helps you get away from the pervasive red and black coolers the Radeon HD 5000 lineup is known for.

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

There are two tiers of graphics cards out there, those that are worthy of overclocking and those that aren’t. Architecture differences, namely memory bandwidth, are the biggest roadblock to overclocking effectiveness.

TweakTown has a look at how well the Sapphire Radeon HD 5670 handles some increased clock speeds and it’s not looking so hot:

You’re not going to get a game changing experience with the extra clocks on offer and when you look through the graphs you see that the performance increase is only a couple of FPS here and there, which doesn’t sound all that impressive.

If you intend on grabbing a Radeon HD 5670 with some tweaking on your mind you might just want to save up and go for something with a wider memory bus width otherwise appreciate it for what it is as a media accelerating, low-power using, mid-range card.

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.

Putting together a gaming rig used to mean laying down a rather large chunk of cash for the best components that would give you an advantage over the competition…or in some cases just to run that new game that requires insane system resources. Thankfully the mid-range isn’t too far off from the high-end nowadays.

The Sapphire Radeon HD 5770 and 5850 graphics cards are a step below the current high end but the low performance means quite a bit of cash saved. Hardware Canucks has the review:

When push comes to shove, the two cards featured here may seem to be nothing more than distant relatives when it comes to benchmarks. However, it is quite evident they are both perfectly positioned to take full advantage of the market segments they are competing in. ATI really did make a series of rational, well thought-out decisions when releasing the HD 5770 and HD 5850 since while there is enough of a buffer zone between them in terms of price and performance that they will never end up competing with one another. They also both outclass anything from the competition…so much so that it seems NVIDIA has stopped producing their competing GT 200 series and is instead patiently waiting for GF100 to arrive.

Either card is certain to give your gaming performance a boost.

The bulk of the graphics cards that are released with a GPU launch tend to stick near the factory settings because most manufacturers are in a rush to get their products to market quicker, the more interesting stuff comes along later.

The XFX Radeon HD 5870 XXX Edition serves up a bit of a clock speed bump which will power it past its stock clocked brothers. Motherboards.org has the review:

The XFX version of the HD 5870 card has a clock speed of 875MHz, which is 25MHz faster than the HD 5870 reference design. Their XT version has a clock speed of 865MHz which is a small decrease from this card. XFX has overclocked the memory by 100MHz over the reference clock as well. The memory on the card is GDDR5 memory which doubles the bandwidth of that found on GDDR3 memory. This translates into a memory data rate of 5.2Gbps and a memory bandwidth of 166.4GB/second.

It’s a speedier solution for those that can’t be bothered to do their own tweaking.

Graphics cards have a habit of improving quite rapidly so what was high end last year is suddenly mid-range this year and on down that line. You won’t see us complaining about that trend much.

AMD’s Radeon HD 5670 sports the same great DX11 supporting feature set found on its bigger brothers but snips off a few processign elements here and there to come in as a value chip. AnandTech has the review:

At $99, the 5670 is intended to stake out the all-important sub-$100 position for video cards, which is a big price point for price-sensitive buyers and OEMs. Bear in mind that the entire sub-$100 market encompassed 2/3rds of all video card sales last quarter, according to AMD and Mercury Research. Given the low transistor count and small die size of the 5670, we expect that AMD will have a lot of price latitude to work with going forward – as 40nm production costs and GDDR5 costs come down, this board should be cheaper to make than the 4670 ever was.

A great replacement for power hungry cards of the past with plenty of horsepower to do some gaming on.

Gaming is as stressful and activity your PC is likely to go through. Those lit, shaded, anti-aliased, and anisotropic filtered pixels require more than a bit of processing power to pump out and have always presented a big problem to graphics card manufacturers…well at least they used to.

ATI’s Radeon HD 5970 is so powerful your single high resolution display is insignificant to it, in fact it practically demands you purchase more monitors so you can enjoy multi-screen gaming. InsideHW has the review:

First of all, we must admit that ATI Radeon HD 5970 is fastest graphics card in the world at this moment. This was more-or-less expected, but we were actually pleasantly surprised by efficiency of internal CrossFire bridge. With new PLX chip, SidePort memory is redundant. The fact that in some cases HD 5970 is almost twice faster than HD 5870 confirms that CrossFire development is doing just fine and moving in right direction.

It’s much faster than you’d imagine. Powerful enough that it might just delay the vicious graphics card upgrade cycle by a few months.