ATI Radeon HD 5450 & HD 5570 Review
Radeon HD 5450
The HD 5450 is a low-profile, low-power card will retail for roughly $50. This 6.4W idle, 19.1W load GPU will be available in 512MB and 1GB versions. The memory types will be either GDDR2 or GDDR3 variants. I think it would be a great option for a Home Theatre Personal Computer (HTPC). With silence in mind, passively cooled versions will also be available.
Here are the full specifications:
This GPU (codename: Cedar) is designed with excellent performance-per-watt in mind and it does rather well. The architecture of this GPU lends itself to low-power graphics acceleration and possesses the following characteristics:
- 2 SIMD engines
- 80 Stream Processing Units
- 8 Texture Units
- 648-bit memory interface
- Providing a memory bandwidth of 12.8 GB/sec
Here is a diagram of the GPU:
Here are some nice shots of the reference card itself:
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The specs on the HD 5450 are impressive given its price tag. Now for a look at its bigger brother, the HD 5570.
The 5570 consumes 69 watts more power under load and 40 watts more in idle? No way, something must have gone wrong here. The results on other sites are in a different league – single digit watt difference in idle and ~30 watts under load.
Thanks for your comment Howitzer. The fact is exactly as I stated, this is the power draw on the *entire* system. Other sites may have the tools such as power meters that can measure the video card power draw at the slot level. I am only privy to a Kill-A-Watt unit.
The major factor in this is that the 1100W PSU that powers my system has driven up the idle power load quite a bit. Now the difference in the figures will also take into account any additional power draw from the CPU also being under load along with other smaller components like hard drive(s) spinning up and so on.
We do hope to continue improving our testing with better equipment, as our very limited resources will allow.
Thanks for your time. =)