ATI Radeon HD 5450

Full Review

With the Radeon HD 5670 and HD 5450, ATI has now moved its focus to the budget graphics card segment. This move hasn’t been the best for ATI though because as you saw with the HD 5670, rather than the performance, it is the price-point that takes center-stage. As a result, at its current price, the HD 5450 is somewhat of a disappointment.

Features

The HD 5450 is available with both 512MB and 1GB of video memory. It has a core that is clocked at 650MHz and a memory clock speed of 800MHz. Although it uses DDR3 RAM, its memory bandwidth has been limited to 64-bit, which is below par. Like the other 5000 series cards from ATI, the HD 5450 supports DirectX 11 and ATI’s Eyefinity technology (that allows one card to output to multiple displays).

Design

We got a reference card from ATI, so the design is sure to change in the hands of different manufacturers. The reference card had a small fan embedded in a heatsink over the core and three ports- VGA, HDMI and DVI. The card is slim and small and will fit into a regular cabinet without any issues. The card also does not require any additional power so there is no input port. The card also has low power requirements- 6.4 watts at idle and about 19 watts during regular usage. Owing to its small size, it runs silently and has no temperature issues. At full load in an open setup, the core temperature went up to 47 degrees while at idle it dropped to 35 degrees. All in all, the HD 5450 is perfectly designed to fit into an HTPC.

Performance

The stand-out feature of the HD 5450 is that it is the most inexpensive DirectX 11 card in the market. Unfortunately, that does not mean its performance is noteworthy. Overall, it is a card with one of the lowest performance scores that I have reviewed. In fact, its scores even fall short of the HD 4550. Performance-wise, among ATI cards, I would put it between the HD 4350 and the HD 4550.

In 3D Mark ’06, the HD 5450 gave me a score of 3,792. In 3D Mark Vantage’s Entry preset, the score was 6,916. The gaming benchmarks proved that the Radeon should not be considered if you want to play relatively new games even at low resolutions and settings. We tested the card using Crysis, Far Cry 2 and Tom Clancy’s H.A.W.X and in all cases (except one) the frame-rates were unable to cross 20fps.

Bottom Line

The ATI Radeon HD 5450 (1GB) is priced at Rs. 5,000 exclusive of taxes. It is a fair product if you are looking for a card for your HTPC and a good one if you are especially concerned about DirectX 11. However, at its current price there are other cards we would recommend over it including the HD 4550 and the Nvidia Geforce GT120. On the other hand, at a price-point between 3-3.5K, the HD 5450 would definitely be a card to look at for your HTPC.