ATI Radeon HD 5450: Eyefinity And HTPCs For Everyone?
Table of contents
- 1. A Radeon For The Rest Of Us?
- 2. ATI's Radeon HD 5450 Architecture
- 3. Budget Eyefinity
- 4. HTPC And Stream
- 5. Radeon HD 5450: The Reference Card
- 6. Test Setup And Benchmarks
- 7. Synthetic Benchmark: 3DMark Vantage
- 8. Game Benchmark: Far Cry 2
- 9. Game Benchmark: Crysis
- 10. Game Benchmark: World In Conflict: Soviet Assault
- 11. Game Benchmark: Left 4 Dead
- 12. Game Benchmark: H.A.W.X. And DirectX 10.1
- 13. Game Benchmark: DiRT 2 and DirectX 11
- 14. AntiAliasing and Anisotropic Filtering Benchmark
- 15. Power and Temperature Benchmarks
- 16. Conclusion
AMD floored us with the performance (and price) of its Radeon HD 5970, awed us with the 5870's triple-display Eyefinity capabilities, wowed us with the 5850's value, excited us with the 5770's alacrity in a home theater system, impressed us with its mainstream 5750, and intrigued us with the relatively entry-level 5670.
We have written quite a few Radeon HD 5000-series launch reviews over the past few months, and every one of the company's new products has demonstrated serious gaming prowess to its respective price segment.
Every one of them, that is, until now. Enter ATI's Radeon HD 5450. This is not a piece of hardware that targets our gaming audience. But at $50, it's the Radeon HD 5000-series card for the rest of us. I use the term 'us' somewhat loosely here, as I consider myself a gamer. You get the idea, though.
If you've been paying attention to the recent Radeon launches, then you know there's a lot more to like than just gaming performance: the Eyefinity multi-monitor support and Dolby TrueHD/DTS-HD Master Audio over a protected audio path features mentioned above actually carry over across all members of the 5000-series seen thus far. Anyone excited by those value-adds thus far will be happy to see that they are once again exposed on today's replacement of the Radeon HD 4350 and 4550 cards.
Let's take a closer look at the new Radeon HD 5450 and draw some conclusions about how well it serves that low-end discrete audience. We know it's not a gaming card, but we cant help ourselves; we'll even check out gaming performance for the sake of being thorough.
What a terrible opening paragraph! You slated the 5000 series because it wasn't as big an advancement as the 400 series!
1280x1024 is 5x4
1024x768 is 4x3
1280x960 is 4x3
Sexy heat sink albeit at the cost of losing an expansion slot.
As much as you don't like it, I think this is a fantastic card. Perfect for HTPC users right down to the fact it's half height (I believe I mentioned half height cards when these were first announced). Very attractive price point especially given savings on a sound card. Full marks to AMD for this one.
Hmm..how long before this card is effectively replaced by the next IGP? Got mixed feelings about it, to be honest..it's neither good nor bad, it just exists. Tough call buying this one.
The lower end of the 5000 series is a bit disappointing. I'm not convinced the 5450 is worth it for an HTPC given it's high price (>£50) in the UK - especially since a 785G motherboards is around the same price. I was holding out for the 5570, but it must sit between the 5450 and 5670 in price (~£60?) with performance somwhere between the two. The 4650 at
Ouch, Ouch, poor lil' blighter didn't like those benches much. I'll forgive it if the UK price is loooooooow. I do love the passive cooling!
However, aspect ratio of the screen isn't the pixel ratio, it's physical width and height. For example, if I run 1280x1024 on my monitor then it is 16:9 (and horribly stretched).
Not what the article implied though...
So what we've got here is a DirectX 11 card which doesn't have enough power to play DirectX games... If this was a Nvidia card you would have ripped into it no end, I really think Toms is getting ATI Bias; maybe theres some form of agreement here we don't know about.