HIS 5570 Silence 512MB

The 5570 hasn't exactly overwhelmed folks but HIS hope to change your mind with their passively cooled 'Silence' version.

Specifications

The box for the HIS HD 5570 Silence 512MB is the usual HIS fare, which is to say it's pretty good. Unlike most boxes, HIS have recently changed their packaging to an upright format so all the pertinent information on the front and rear should be viewed vertically. And there is plenty of information to view.

Inside the white outer box is a blue interior box that holds the card and other contents. The card is packed firmly into a clear plastic tray with the rest of the contents under this tray. Being a lower end card, the HIS HD 5570 Silence 512MB doesn't really come with much; you get a basic paper installation guide booklet, and driver and software disk, and also (while stocks last) a 10% off Battlefield Bad Company 2 voucher via EA Download.

As the Silence in the name would suggest, the card itself is completely passively cooled with a rather imposing black aluminum heatsink. It looks a little like a bird of prey with it's wings spread, but it does encroach into the second slot area. No heat-pipes or anything, just a good old fashioned heatsink with fins.

Naturally, the card doesn't require extra power so you won't find any power ports at the rear of the card. On the back, things are also uneventful but you can see that HIS have made sure the heatsink is securely attached.

The single slot I/O panel features a DisplayPort socket, HDMI socket and a DVI socket. No VGA adapter is included so if you need one, you'll have to buy one separately. Obviously this card is targeted towards those who don't require much from their graphics but want a high resolution display. Still, a DVI-VGA adapter would have been handy for some although no doubt the number who would require one or don't already have one is probably minimal, and if it keeps costs down that are passed on to the customer, were not going to complain too much.

Testing

Test Setup: Intel Core 2 Duo 6420 @ 3.20GHz, 4GB of OCZ PC2-6400 Ram @ 960MHz, Asus Blitz Formula, Silicon Power M10 32GB + Seagate Momentus XT, Asetek Waterchill Watercooling, Hyper Type M 730w PSU. All latest drivers as of June 2010 and the OS is Windows 7 64bit.

For comparison, we are testing against a default clocked Nvidia GT240 512MB card, as they both fit into the same market price and target.

Software

Left 4 Dead 2 - Recording a custom demo on the Dead Center, Hotel level (inside in the inferno), we used FRAPS to record frame rates as we played back the demo on all cards at same settings.

Batman Arkham Asylum – We used a combination of the in game benchmark and FRAPS to gather our numbers for this game. All cards were set to the highest possible settings for that card.

Crysis Warhead – We used the Framebuffer benchmark tool to run through the Ambush demo and recorded the results with FRAPS. Settings for each card were set to highest possible for that card.

Colin McRae's DiRT2 - DiRT2 has some very good looking visuals and provides us with our DirectX 11 test. We used FRAPS with the games inbuilt benchmark to test a quick run around a London track.

Devil May Cry 4 Benchmark - DMC4's benchmark provides a nice way of testing that anyone can do. Results are all from the benchmark itself, and include average frame rates as well as 4 graphs for each level tested. Settings for all cards were the same.