PowerColor (GO! Green) Radeon HD 5450
PowerColor's Radeon HD 5450 is the ultimate HTPC (Home Theater Personal Computer) video card. Designed to be environmentally friendly, It use very little power (~20 watts on full load) and is virtually silent due to it's passive cooling. The card it also very inexpensive, averaging around 40 dollars as of 2011 and will fit in slimline cases since it is low profile.
Rating: 9.5/10
Details Overview
Model: |
AX5450 512MK3-SH |
|---|---|
| Chipset Manufacturer: | AMD (ATI) |
| Interface: | PCI Express 2.1 x16 |
| Maximum Resolution: | 2560 x 1600 |
| Recommended Power Supply: | 350 Watts |
| Core Clock: | 650MHz |
| Stream Processors: | 80 Stream Processing Units |
| Effective Memory Clock: | 1334MHz |
| Memory Size: | 512MB |
| Memory Interface: | 64-bit |
| Memory Type: | DDR3 |
| DirectX Version: | 11 |
| OpenGL Version: | 3.2 |
| Output Ports: | VGA, DIV and HDMI |
The Good
- Inexpensive.
- Quiet.
- Low power. The box recommends a 350Watt power supply, but it runs overclocked on a 275W PSU!
- Low profile.
- Easy to overclock using the include ATI Overdrive software.
The Bad
- Runs quite hot (due to passive cooling) at around 72C at full load.
- Not very powerful, gives a Windows (7) experience index of 3.8 for aero and 5.8 for gaming, but overclocking easily brings those numbers to 5.0 and 6.3 respectively.
Summary
This is a great card unless you're an intensive gamer. Of course, the Radeon HD 5450 will play most mainstream games quite well! Company of Heroes, the Sims 2, Fable : The Lost Chapter, Spore, etc. will run marvelously when compared to integrated graphics. Yet, don't expect 100 FPS on Crysis. This is the card for you if you're looking to upgrade a cheap, lousy integrated chipset, or to build the ultimate home theater PC. We give it a 9.5 out of ten because it does marvelously what it's designed for, but more memory would have been a plus.