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Verdict
You really shouldn't be expecting a lot from the AMD Radeon HD 6570.
It's already a bit of a stretch referring to the AMD Radeon HD 6670 as a gamer's card, even a budget one, but the Radeon HD 6570 can realistically carry no such moniker.
Though they're based on the same exact GPU, the firmware onboard is limiting the clockspeed, dropping it by 150MHz to 650MHz, and there is a certain paucity of graphics memory too.
This Sapphire AMD Radeon HD 6570, though, does at least come with 512MB of GDDR5, rather than the 1GB of DDR3, so has a good deal more bandwidth.
But still, a gaming behemoth it aint.
Rather, this is more of a small, media machine's card, able to throw HD content around without putting the slightest strain on the PC's CPU, while still enabling you to run less-demanding games at low resolutions. In fact, it's exactly what the AMD Radeon HD 5570 was perfect for.
The AMD Radeon HD 6570, then, is the traditional iterative, generational step-up from the card it's replacing. Though it doesn't have the grunt to really justify an upgrade from Radeon HD 5570 to Radeon HD 6570, you simply wont get your money's worth.
So then this is your media centre's ideal companion.
Except not in this Sapphire-guise.
We're big fans of Sapphire's cards, but the fact the Sapphire Radeon HD 6570 here is on a standard-height card while the reference board comes on a half-height PCB seems odd.
With the Sapphire Radeon HD 5570 XtendTV you could justify it via the extra silicon the built-in TV tuner needed to function, but there's no real justification for such a chunky card here.
Sapphire may argue that the extra board size and Arctic Cooling chiller make it a cooler, and subsequently quieter, card for the media centre, but AMD's chunky reference cooler is hardly a turbine.
We liked
Basically it's a decent stab at a media graphics card at the £50 price point.
We disliked
Unfortunately though it's not really offering a hell of a lot more over the last generation of cards, and the standard-height PCB seems a littel unnecessary in what ought to be a HTPC card.
Final word
Unfortunately, unless you've got a rather capacious media centre chassis, and a very limited graphics budget to go with it, there's little reason to recommend this cheapo GPU.
