Introduction

For a technology journalist like yours truly it is sometimes remarkable to see how quickly things can change on the hardware arena. There's always a weird dynamic happening somewhere. The past year or so I have been following the skirmish in-between ATI and NVIDIA very closely. See on the NVIDIA side we still have to wait and see their first DX11 class product, while at the other side ATI is paving away and completely filling and dominating every little gap in the market with a DX11 graphics card.

Let's go though some of the cards that ATI has launched over the past few months ever since roughly the Windows 7 (DX11) release, because it's nearly silly how many product ATI already has put out there. The current lineup consists out the of the following cards:

• Radeon HD 5650
• Radeon HD 5670
• Radeon HD 5750
• Radeon HD 5770
• Radeon HD 5850
• Radeon HD 5870
• Radeon HD 5970

And ATI isn't done yet, you can expect a Radeon HD 5830 which I guarantee you will be a very popular card in performance and price. Then we expect a Radeon HD 5500 series really soon. And today ATI is launching the most budget of low-budget series graphics cards, the Radeon series 5400.  In specific today we'll look at the Radeon HD 5450. A DX11 class product, with multi-monitor Eyefinity support (up-to three monitors) and a very low price -- set at just 49 USD.

And sure this has nothing to do with gaming, this is all about building yourself a value desktop with a graphics card that accelerates APIs here and and there, and for the money versus quality, it will actually make a bitching nice HTPC card that is in fact passively cooled as well.

Check it out and then head on over to the next page please.