Date:
Thursday , February 04, 2010
Author:
Brent Justice
Editor:
Kyle Bennett
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AMD's ATI Radeon HD 5450 Video Card Review

AMD's lowest-end discrete GPU to support DX11 is being launched today at $49-$59 MSRP, the ATI Radeon HD 5450. We will give you all the official information on this new video card, plus some power and temperature testing and a simple apples-to-apples DX11 game test using DiRT 2.

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Our Sample

AMD sent us a sample ATI Radeon HD 5450 to use for testing, except that our sample we received had the memory set at 900 MHz (100 MHz over the specification.) AMD responded to this discrepancy as such:

I am writing you to inform you that we have inadvertently sent you a sample board that did not exactly meet our reference specifications. There is a discrepancy between the memory clocks on the ATI Radeon HD 5450 graphics samples we had sent you and the reference clocks noted in our press deck.

Our reference clocks for the ATI Radeon HD 5450 graphics were set at 650 MHz engine and 800 MHz to allow board partners to choose from as many memory vendors as possible to hit the price points they wanted in the $49-59 SEP range.

However, 512 MB sample boards we have sent you were qualified with memory at 900 MHz and we estimate this to only improve performance on average at most 5.5% in our initial tests including 3DMark Vantage -3DMarks.

That said, we often allow AiB partners differentiate from each other by giving them the ability to configure their boards an any number of ways including memory type used, framebuffer size, display output configuration, cooling solutions and over-clocking.

You will likely find numerous AiB partner boards at slightly difference clocks from one another and this is just one way how we have allowed our board partners differentiate from each other and hit the price points they want to in this highly competitive market segment. The limit we have set for over-clocked products is 900 MHz so partners are free to ship boards with the memory clocked up to that limit and you may see those available from various AiB partners and OEM's

We apologize for any inconvenience caused and if requested we can change the board we sent you with one that meets the exact reference specifications as outlined. -Evan Groenke

Therefore, our power and temperature testing and performance results are with the memory clocked at 900 MHz, as was provided to us. Keep this in mind as you look at this information below, and note that add-in-board partners may deliver differing frequencies based on their models.

The test system used was the same setup we have here, with one difference being we are using a newer driver provided by AMD "ATI_8.69_RC3_Win7_Vista_Jan14."

Power and Temperature

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Power utilization was quite low as we expected, providing an even lesser idle utilization compared to the Radeon HD 5670. This is good news for HTPC users. At full load the system barely reached over 200 Watts, again providing the best power efficiency.

Temperatures were also quite low considering this video card is passively cooled. The idle temperature was no hotter than the Radeon HD 5670 which uses a fan. The Radeon HD 5750 was cooler, but this is because it has a much larger fan and heatsink.

DX11 Performance

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This simple apples-to-apples test simply proves that the ATI Radeon HD 5450 will run a DX11 game title. In this test we are running DiRT 2 in DX11, but with the absolute lowest in-game settings. This means everything was either at "Low", "Ultra Low" or "Off" in the game at 1680x1050 with No AA and No AF. This is what was required to run at a somewhat playable framerate at 1680x1050 on the ATI Radeon HD 5450. We also ran the ATI Radeon HD 5670 at the same settings so you could see the difference in performance between these two price points ($49 and $99.)

What we see here is that the ATI Radeon HD 5450 can indeed run DiRT 2 in DX11, but without any of the special DX11 effects like Tessellation, Cloth or SSAO. Therefore, while we can run in the DX11 API, we cannot benefit from the special DX11 effects it provides.

One thing we also see is that it looks like there is room here for another video card to sit in-between these two, somewhere in the middle. Indeed, AMD will be launching another GPU in less than a week that will do so, and we will include it in this comparison when it is launched next week.

The Bottom Line

The ATI Radeon HD 5450 is not meant to provide the best gaming experience, but it does bring DX11 API support and other features like Eyefinity (albeit useless to gamers) down to the $50 price point. This means that AMD now has a DX11 GPU in every market segment, while the competition simply does not. The ATI Radeon HD 5450 is squarely aimed at the HTPC crowd, or the crowd that wishes to upgrade from their mundane Intel integrated Graphics to gain DX11 support and much better gameplay comparatively. With the low power utilization, passiveness and ability to run Eyefinity + DX11, this makes the Radeon HD 5450 the most feature rich GPU at $50. Now we have a DX11 card we can buy for our mothers.

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