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Since releasing the first Radeon HD 5000 series graphics card some four months ago, AMD has continued its assault on Nvidia with an army of new models. Following the Radeon HD 5870 came the 5850, 5770, 5750, 5970 and most recently the 5670, while today yet another new product is set to make its first appearance.

The new Radeon

HD 5450, code-named Cedar Pro, will be the most affordable graphics card belonging to the HD 5000 series. This is also the first on AMD’s latest wave of graphics products to do away with GDDR5 memory, replacing it with older GDDR3. Naturally, the Radeon HD 5450 is not designed exclusively for 3D gaming and certain versions will support advanced features such as Eyefinity.

The Radeon HD 5450 is stepping in to replace the Radeon HD 4350 graphics card which currently retails for as little as $35 – $40 (512MB) and $45 – $50 (1GB). AMD expects to ask between $50 – 60 for the new HD 5450, but we believe those prices should settle down a little closer to the levels of the older HD 4350 when old inventory is depleted.

 

 

To give you some background information on this budget-minded price point, with the Radeon HD 4350 you basically get what you pay for, meaning this product carries a number of weaknesses. First is that the GPU is limited to a 64-bit wide memory bus, combined with low frequency DDR2 memory and you get a theoretical memory bandwidth of just 8GB/s. To give you can idea of how little bandwidth that is, back in 2001 the Radeon 7500 had 7.4GB/s of bandwidth at its disposal, while the Radeon 9700 Pro which followed in 2002 using the AGP bus achieved a memory bandwidth of 19.8GB/s using original DDR memory. Therefore it’s hard to get excited when we tell you that the new Radeon HD 5450 has a memory bandwidth of just 12.8GB/s.

Opposing the 16 month old Radeon HD 4350 is the GeForce 9400 GT and GeForce 210 graphics cards, the latter almost being a rebadged 9400 GT but manufactured using a 40nm design process.

What is important to note is that the GeForce 210 utilizes a 64-bit memory bus across all models and supports either DDR2 or DDR3 memory. The faster DDR3 cards have the exact memory bandwidth as the new Radeon HD 5450, which should make for an interesting head to head comparison. But before we start comparing performance let’s take a closer look at ATI’s latest budget GPU offering.

 

TI Radeon HD 5450 in Detail

The Radeon HD 5450 is the first graphics card in the HD 5000 series that can be cooled passively, making it a solid choice for HTPC systems. The card is said to consume just 19 watts of power under load, which is a fraction of the 61 watts needed to power the Radeon HD 5670 or the 108 watts on the Radeon HD 5770.

A big plus about the Radeon HD 5450 consuming so little power is that it doesn’t require an external power source. The PCI Express bus alone is capable of delivering enough current to this card.

The Radeon HD 5450 also generates very little heat and as we mentioned before, it can be passively cooled. However, the sample we received from AMD used a tiny 40mm fan that cools an equally small 45mm x 45mm heatsink. The passively cooled reference design card features a much larger dual-slot heatsink that measures 85mm long, 55mm wide and 30mm tall.

Compared to the Radeon HD 5670, which measures 17cm, the Radeon HD 5450 is actually the same length. This is also the same as the GeForce GT 240 and should fit in any case that can support a mATX motherboard. The Radeon HD 5450 uses a low-profile design measuring just 5.5cm tall, whereas a typical graphics card is 9.5cm tall.

Test System Specs & 3Dmark Vantage

Core i5 Test System Specs
- Intel Core i7 965 Extreme Edition (Overclocked @ 3.70GHz)
- x3 2GB G.Skill DDR3 PC3-12800 (CAS 9-9-9-24)
- Asus P6T Deluxe (Intel X58)
- OCZ GameXStream (700 watt)
- Seagate 500GB 7200-RPM (Serial ATA300)
- Gigabyte GeForce 8400GS (512MB)
- Gigabyte Radeon HD 4350 (512MB)
- ATI Radeon HD 5450 (1GB)
- Gigabyte Radeon HD 4650 (1GB)
- Inno3D GeForce GT 220 (1GB)
- Gigabyte Radeon HD 4670 (512MB)
- Asus Radeon HD 3850 (512MB)
- ATI Radeon HD 5670 (512MB)
- Inno3D GeForce GT 240 (512MB)
- Asus GeForce 9600 GT (512MB)
- HIS Radeon HD 4770 (512MB)
- Asus GeForce 9800 GT (1GB)
Software
- Microsoft Windows 7 Ultimate (64-bit)
- Nvidia Forceware 195.62
- ATI Catalyst 10.1
- ATI 8.69 RC3 Win7 Vista (Jan14)

First up we ran the cards through 3Dmark Vantage at three different resolutions. At 1440×900, the Radeon HD 5450 was vastly superior than the older Radeon HD 4350. On the other hand, it feel short of even getting closer to the Radeon HD 4650 we tested with ($70 nowadays). With a score of less than 1000pts at 1440×900, we are not expecting much in the coming gaming benchmarks.

The core configuration of the Radeon HD 5450 includes 80 SPUs, 8 TAUs (Texture Address Units) and 4 ROPs (Rasterization Operator Units). That’s considerably less than other cards in the series, and just the same as the previous generation Radeon HD 4350 and 4550.

Core clock speed is set at 650 MHz, which should be good for 104 gigaflops of raw computing power, while GDDR3 memory operates at 800MHz. The Radeon HD 5450 can come configured with either 512MB or 1GB of memory — the sample we are reviewing today features 1GB. As with all low-end graphics cards we highly recommend you purchase the lowest memory capacity model possible. This is because they are cheaper and do not sacrifice much if any performance.

There are no bridge connectors on the Radeon HD 5450, but it’s still possible to link two of these graphics cards through internal CrossFireX.

The Radeon HD 5450 keeps Eyefinity support on select models, so if this is the feature you are looking for on a budget card, make sure your selected brand and model can support it. Like its higher-end variants in the 5000 series, you can hook up to three high resolution monitors (up to 2560×1600) to this board.

Benchmarks: Company of Heroes, Crysis Warhead

Despite of having the Radeon HD 5450 easily outscoring the older HD 4350 in 3Dmark Vantage, this has not translated into better real-world performance, at least not with Company of Heroes. Here the Radeon HD 5450 delivered virtually the same lackluster experience as the Radeon HD 4350, making it 50% slower than the Radeon HD 4650 and GeForce GT 220 graphics cards.

Crysis Warhead confirms the results we found when testing with Company of Heroes. This game also shows very similar performance between the old Radeon HD 4350 and the new Radeon HD 5450. The Radeon HD 5450 was 38% slower than the Radeon HD 4650 at 1440×900 and 62% slower than the GeForce GT 220.

Benchmarks: Far Cry 2, Unreal Tournament 3

When testing with Far Cry 2 using high quality settings the Radeon HD 5450 was found to be roughly 2-3fps faster than the old Radeon HD 4350. Of course neither card was able to deliver playable performance and we recommend the Radeon HD 4670 or greater for playing at 1440×900.

Interestingly, the Radeon HD 5450 leaves the old Radeon HD 4350 well behind when testing with Unreal Tournament 3. That said, with just 31fps at 1440×900, Unreal Tournament 3 which was released back in 2007 seems to be as far as we will stretch the Radeon HD 5450 for gaming purposes.

Benchmarks: S.T.A.L.K.E.R.: Call of Pripyat, Street Fighter IV

S.T.A.L.K.E.R.: Call of Pripyat is one of the newest games we are testing with, so it is no surprise that the Radeon HD 5450 is unable to deliver playable performance here. Turning down the visual quality settings to medium, we still saw a miserable 12.7fps at 1440×900. That said, the Radeon HD 4650 was not much better, and we recommend having nothing slower than the Radeon HD 5670 or GeForce 9600 GT to play this game.

Street Fighter IV is one of the least demanding games featured in this review and as a result the Radeon HD 5450 was able to render an average of 30.8fps at 1440×900.

 

Benchmarks: World in Conflict Soviet Assault, Wolfenstein

World in Conflict is a highly demanding real-time strategy game and as such the Radeon HD 5450 does not fare well. At 1440×900 we saw just 15fps, making the Radeon HD 5450 roughly 38% slower than the Radeon HD 4650 and 50% slower than the GeForce GT 220.

Finally we have Wolfenstein, which was tested using best visual quality settings with the exception off AA/AF which were disabled. At 1440×900 we got about 20fps, making the Radeon HD 5450 roughly 41% slower than the Radeon HD 4650.

Overclocking Performance

When overclocking the Radeon HD 5450 we were limited to the OverDrive function in the ATI Catalyst Control panel, which allowed for a maximum core and memory frequency of 700/900MHz. This minor overclock did provide a 15% performance increase at 1680×1050 in Company of Heroes. That said, going from 12.9fps to 14.9fps is hardly anything worth getting excited over.

Power Consumption & Temperatures

While the Radeon HD 5450 may not have been very impressive when measuring gaming performance, the power consumption figures are quite good. Under load the Radeon HD 5450 used 10% less power than the GeForce GT 220, though it’s worth pointing out that more often than not the performance gap between these two cards was wider than 10% in the GeForce’s favor. The same could be said about the Radeon HD 4650, which was considerably faster for gaming.

The heatsink and fan cooling setup used on our review sample was on the cheap side, even for a budget graphics card, so we hope that AMD partners can come up with far more impressive solutions. Despite the low power consumption levels of the Radeon HD 5450, our board still ran rather hot, almost reaching 60 degrees under load. This made the Radeon HD 5450 hotter than the Radeon HD 4650 and GeForce GT 240 graphics cards, both of which carried upgraded coolers.

Final Thoughts

Thus far AMD

has hardly shocked us with their sub-$100 Radeon HD 5000 graphics offerings. The Radeon HD 5670 that we reviewed a few weeks back was able to put away the GeForce GT 240 in most tests, but the performance margins were close. The bigger issue surrounds the fact that the GeForce GT 240 is a horrible product in itself, not to mention it’s seriously outclassed by the older and slightly more expensive GeForce 9800 GT and Radeon HD 4770.

What makes these cards different to the Radeon HD 5450 is that you shouldn’t expect to play games with a card in this price point. It wasn’t possible before and that hasn’t changed today.

Looking at the current market we have the GeForce GT 220 retailing for $60 (512MB) and $70 (1GB), while the Radeon HD 4650 is priced at $50 (512MB) and $60 (1GB). Both graphics cards are considerably faster than the Radeon HD 5450 in gaming scenarios, but once again we would recommend spending an extra $30 for true gaming-level performance and not the extra $10 for either of these — (Ed. Note: there’s also a missing Radeon HD 5500 coming up pretty soon).

The Radeon HD 4350, which the Radeon HD 5450 seems to replace is priced at just $35 (512MB) or $45 (1GB), while AMD expects to charge a bit more for the Radeon HD 5450 at launch ($50-60).

So with games out of the equation, we feel more comfortable recommending a motherboard that features an integrated graphics platform (IGP) as this will save you a bit of money, and there are plenty of options to choose from. There is a limited market for HTPC builders who may like what the Radeon HD 5450 has to offer, especially in terms of form factor and power consumption, however we can’t say other products that were already available can’t perform the same job.

While a couple of years ago a cheap discrete GPU could have made a lot of sense over underpowered integrated solutions, today that gap is as narrow as ever when gaming is not a concern.

Because the Radeon HD 5450 inherits most features present on its higher-priced siblings, Eyefinity is expected to be present in select models using the Radeon HD 5450 GPU. In other words, an Eyefinity enabled Radeon HD 5450 will likely be the cheapest way for you to get triple monitor support.

 

credit : http://www.techspot.com/review/244-ati-radeon-hd-5450