Radeon HD 5450 review - Specifications and features

by Hilbert Hagedoorn on: 02/03/2010 03:00 PM [ ] 0 comment(s)

Well now -- today ATI is launching their most low-cost series of graphics cards in the 5000 range. You guys know this under codename Cedar and if we dig a little deeper, this would be the RV810 GPU.

We already spilled the beans a little, this card has nothing to do with gaming, though in all honesty it's still twice as fast as any standard embedded IGP out there. But with merely 80 shader processors, sure this has very little to do with gaming in the year 2010.

But what can you do with the Radeon HD 5450 then ? Well first off, it's certainly a diverse graphics card. The reference sample we received already has thee monitor outputs, that offers flexibility. Now armed with Eyefinity support you can drive up-to 3 monitors simultaneously as well, and sure again .. not for gaming, but for desktop usage or a nice presentation that kicks ass at 49 USD -- I really don't even want to mention the 299 USD Matrox Triplehead2Go anymore here as that product just doesn't make sense any longer.

Process	40nm
Transistors	292M
Engine Clock	650 MHz
Stream Processors	80
Compute Performance	104 GFLOPS
Texture Units	8
Texture Fillrate	5.2 GTexels/s
ROPs	4
Pixel Fillrate	2.6 Gpixel/s
Z/Stencil	10.4 GSamples/s
Memory Type	DDR3 / DDR2
Memory Clock	Up to 800 MHz
Memory Data Rate	Up to 1.8 Gbps
Memory Bandwidth	Up to 12.8 GB/s
Typical Board Power	19.1 W
Idle Board Power	6.4 W

So we determined that the Radeon HD 5450 has only 80 Stream processors, to reflect that number; the most high-end Single GPU from ATI has 1600 of em. Quite a difference. But the 80 Shader processors can still be used to assist several compute based applications, it can speed up your Flash animations, help along with video transcoding but most of all the 80 Shader processors can be utilized with software like Media player Classic HT to optimize image quality (post process) with better colors, depth and image sharpening. We'll show you that in this article.

The card also embeds the updated UVD 2.0 engine to fully help accelerate and decode high-definition content like Blu-ray. We'll talk about UVD 2.0 in a minute though. Let's sift through a comparison.

	Radeon HD 5450	Radeon HD 5670	Radeon HD 5750	Radeon HD 5770	Radeon HD 5870
Process	40nm	40nm	40nm	40nm	40nm
Transistors	292M	627M	1.04B	1.04B	2.15B
Core Clock	650 MHz	775 MHz	725 MHz	850 MHz	850 MHz
Shader Processors	80	400	720	800	1600
Compute Performance	104 GFLOPs	620 GFLOPs	1.008 TFLOPs	1.36 TFLOPs	2.72 TFLOPs
Texture Units	8	20	36	40	80
Texture Fillrate	5.2 GTexels/s	15.5 GTexels/s	25.2 GTexels/s	34 GTexels/s	68.0 GTexels/s
ROPs	4	8	16	16	32
Pixel Fillrate	2.6 GPixels/s	3.2 GPixels/s	11.2 GPixels/s	13.6 GPixels/s	27.2 GPixels/s
Z/Stencil	10.4 GSamples/s	24.8 GSamples/s	44.8 GSamples/s	54.4 GSamples/s	108.8 GSamples/s
Memory Type	GDDR3/2	GDDR5	GDDR5	GDDR5	GDDR5
Memory Clock	800~900 MHz	1000 MHz	1150 MHz	1200	1200 MHz
Memory Data Rate	1.8 Gbps	4.0 Gbps	4.6 Gbps	4.8 Gbps	4.8 Gbps
Memory Bandwidth	12.8 GB/s	64 GB/s	73.6 GB/s	76.8 GB/s	153.6GB/s
Maximum Board Power (TDP)	19W	61W	86W	108W	188W
Idle Board Power	6W	14W	16W	18	27W

As you can see, power consumption wise these puppies are going to shine, not even a 6-pin power cable connector is needed as the peak wattages are well below the 75 Watt PCIe slot limitation. The maximum wattage (TDP) is just 19 Watts and when the card is idling it will use up only 6W of power thanks to many clever power saving scheme's and well, the lack of huge numbers of transistors.

The 5450 infact achieves a low 6W IDLE power consumption by clocking down in several power stages. Thus a low engine (core) clock frequency with lowered voltages and lower GDDR3 memory power. Clocked down the GPU runs 157 MHz from 650 MHz and the memory 200 MHz, coming from 900 MHz.

Radeon HD 5450

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