Sapphire Radeon HD 5570 - 1 GB DDR3 HDMI/DVI-I/VGA PCI-Express Graphics Card 100293L

I actually bought this card to "downgrade" from an Nvidia 9600 GT Low Profile Low Power card. I run a low profile Core i7 system (yes I'm crazy) mainly for doing video encoding, and I wanted a decent low profile graphics card in order to do some light gaming. However, my 9600 recently started getting unstable on me, so I needed to get a replacement. My older card used a DVI to VGA converter (yes, I have a VGA-only monitor, but it has component ports in the back as well for my Wii and PS3, which is why I bought that monitor in the first place), and for some reason, after it got unstable, the native resolution of my monitor was unable to be detected, and when I forced it to the native resolution, it resulted in blurry areas in the middle-left and middle-right section of my monitor. Now that I'm going through a native VGA port on the Radeon 5570, the sharpness came back, and the native resolution of my monitor is detected.

One other thing is that this card is a standard size...Read more

The card is a little pricey but defenitetly worth to have in your HTPC.. HD 5450 doesnt cut the mustard but the 5570 does.. This particular sapphire card screamed quality as soon as I pulled it out of the box.. Made me feel it was worth all of what I paid for it. With 1 Gig of DDR3 Memory and HDMI with DTS MA HD pass through, this thing handles any Movie I can throw at it, both BluRay discs and MKV Rips.. Overall Very pleased..

I picked this Sapphire version with HDMI in July to build a budget system for playing Starcraft II, after my laptop died (too much Starcraft II beta?). It runs pretty nicely on medium settings - smooth in all but the largest games, where I suspect CPU may be the main limiting factor. I have shaders on medium since it doesn't have too many shading units. Theoretically you can set textures to high since it has 1GB memory, but I left that at medium too.

Aside from that, the reasons I bought this card were the price (I believe I got it for [...] after rebate, which took forever), and the low Wattage - relative to its performance, that is. Coming at the low end of a new line of graphics cards, it benefits from the newest chip architecture and newest fabrication process.

I haven't used the HDMI or DVI, good old style connector seems to work fine. I do need to try hooking it up to my TV some day as SC2 runs in widescreen aspect. :-D