Axle AMD ATI Radeon HD 5450 Video Review
Conclusion
As I mentioned in the unboxing video, I was pleasantly surprised that the Axle HD 5450 uses passive cooling. As a video card that caters to the HTPC crowd, I believe that a passive cooling solution is the most important factor when a user buys a video card for HTPC use because it is completely silent. I was also quite pleased with the design of the heatsink. The HD 5450 has more going for it including its low power consumption and some light gaming as evident from the performance videos.
I believe that if you want to game on this video card, you should not expect stellar performance in the latest games, however in the huge older game catalog on PC platform you can expect some reasonable performance even at higher image quality settings. We had to turn down some image quality settings in some of the latest games.
The arrival of Flash 10.1 has enabled GPU acceleration for flash videos and we saw an example of this as the Axle HD 5450 video card was able to very smoothly accelerate Toy Story 3 1080p trailer on Youtube. You can also expect GPU acceleration for your Blu-ray movies with the right software, which really lends credence to the use of this card in a HTPC.
I would highly recommend the Axle HD 5450 to anyone seriously considering a HTPC setup and I would like to award it the ABT “Recommended” award.
Pros-
- Silent because of the passive cooling solution
- Low cost of ownership
- Half height
- Low power consumption
Cons-
- None
Nice videos – very real world.
I’ve always had a soft spot for passively cooled video cards, but unfortunately they don’t offer enough gaming performance for someone like me.
I would’ve liked to see a couple of things:
(1) GPU temperature during gaming sessions (just show complete GPU-Z).
(2) Overclocking — yes yes, I realize it’s a low spec card but I’d try to overclock it anyway.
(3) Post music track information if you use them for the background. I liked some and would like to find out more about them.
The videos are well done. Maybe chop them further? For instance one video per game you tested, and shorten the intro? Or maybe there’s bookmarks you could use — i don’t know jack about youtube.
Overall good job and it’s always nice to see actual gameplay.
@hansmuff Thank you for your comment.
1. If you watch in 1080p you can make out the temperature in top left from MSI Afterburner.
2. I normally do overclocking, but left it out due to this card being mainly low spec. But since you know the performance at stock speeds, so you can expect better performance after overclocking.
3. Music info is posted in the video description on Youtube.
This gpu is great when you overclock it had it running at 850mhz stable core clock.