PowerColor (Go! Green) Radeon HD 5450 Review

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

Radeon Hd 5450

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.

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