ASUS EAH6670 - Not for Hard-Core Gamers

While serious gamers are very particular about their hardware and want the absolute best from their graphics card, there are many others who need more affordable solutions. The Radeon 6000 series is a large family of GPUs and there are cards based on them for different price brackets. The Radeon HD6670 GPU, codenamed Turks, falls in the lower mid-range price bracket and was launched not too long ago. Typically, someone with  a budget of around Rs. 6,000 would opt for a card such as the Radeon HD6670. We’re looking today at ASUS’s Radeon HD6670 card.

Dust-proof fan

Features and Design

Being one of the Radeon HD6000 series of cards, the HD6670 too is a DirectX 11 compliant GPU. The card we received, the EAH6670/DIS/1GD5 uses a gigabyte of GDDR5 memory. Some other vendors also sell the Radeon HD6670 in 512 MB variants.

The ASUS HD6670 has three connectivity options at the rear of the card - a DVI port, a DisplayPort and an HDMI port. Using AMD’s Eyefinity, the card can be used to connect three displays at once if you need to.  ASUS bundles a DVI-D-Sub converter with the card.

Ports for HDMI, DisplayPort and DVI

ASUS has fitted their own custom cooler on the HD6670. The design of the card and cooler is similar to some of their previous models. Being one of the lower-end cards, the ASUS HD6670 doesn’t require any additional power connectors. AMD rates the HD6670 at having a TDP of 66W under load, which is extremely low as compared to some of the other high-end cards.

The heatsink on the card is fairly large for its size but the plastic cover takes up most of the space. The card could have been slimmer. Currently, the card takes up just one external expansion slot but internally, it takes up a little more space. The heatsink only makes contact with the GPU and doesn’t cool the memory. The heatsink takes up a large area due to its protruding fins design but the core of the heatsink is where contact is made with the GPU.

Performance

The HD6670 is no monster - the performance is way slower than most of the mid-range graphics cards such as the GeForce GTX560 or AMD’s Radeon HD6870. 3D Mark Vantage recorded a very average score of 8464 points and a GPU score 6972. There were some surprising results as well. Most of the older but intensive games such as Just Cause 2 and Mafia 2 brought the 6670 down to its knees even with the resolution limited to 1680x1050. Average frame rates in these games were around 30 to 35 fps. The detail quality was kept at high in these games but anti-aliasing and anisotropic filtering turned off. The intensive Heaven benchmark too scored average points.

Inconsistent performances

The older and matured Half Life 2 engine powered game, Left 4 Dead 2 did a lot better. Scores shot up to 152.53 fps with our recorded timedemo. Crysis 2 without any anti-aliasing does wonders for the card. We recorded average frame rates in excess of 150 fps. With FSAA set to 2x, a massive performance hit was noticed. Clearly, the HD6670 isn’t designed for high anti aliasing and anisotropic filtering settings.

The card stays very cool under idle conditions and it could probably be designed as a passively cooled card. Under benchmarks loads, it does warm just a tiny bit. Overclocking it is also possible.

ASUS HD6670 with DirectX11 and Eyefinity support

Verdict

The ASUS HD6670 is priced at Rs. 6,000, which makes it a very affordable card to buy. It’s not designed for the die-hard gamers amongst us who like to play the latest of games at the highest possible settings. We’ve seen that performance in games isn’t very consistent. If you’re looking to play some of the older games at high details but with resolutions limited to 1680x1050, you should be fine with this card. If you want a card for your desktop but you want something that will let you play a few games of Counter Strike Source or Team Fortress 2 from time to time, then go for the HD6670. You won’t be disappointed.