ATI Radeon HD5450 HTPC Video Card Review

[Olin Coles]

ATI Radeon HD5450 HTPC Video Card

Just when I thought they had finished cutting halves, ATI has taken the 40nm Cypress architecture to a new low. Low power, that is. In a brand new design, unlike anything they have released with this architecture, ATI is going after the Home Theater PC market with their heat sinks blazing. OK, I exaggerate; the Radeon HD5450 video card actually runs pretty cool, which is the point, really. It's silent, too, with a large and lovely red heatsink sitting atop the tiny GPU, sans fan. Follow along with Benchmark Reviews as we investigate an early sample of ATI's new standard bearer for low-power HTPC applications.

Read more...

[echostar7]

it would have been interesting to see what gains could have been had over previous low profile cards offered by ATI or nvidia (like the HD 3400). and maby a video test to see if it helps at all with decoding, Im not sure if the gpu is used at all for that aside from coreavc and nvidia cuda.

[Bruce Normann]

Thanks for the feedback, echostar.

I did a little research, and it looks like the the HD5450 performs 80-90% better than the HD3450 in gaming.
Which makes sense, since the HD5450 has twice the number of Stream Processors, 80 v. 40, and a little faster clock.

Your suggestion about looking at video encoding speeds is a good one, I will investigate that.
The HD5450 has all the right features to do it, just like all the new HD5xxx cards.
It's just a question of horsepower, and it would be good to know how fast this mini-me card works for that.
Especially since video playback is its target market.

Bruce.

[Servando Silva]

HD Video playback shouldn´t be an issue on this. Even I don´t think ATI fixed the high@L5.1 H.264 problems.

[echostar7]

thanks guys for the info.