AMD’s Radeon HD 5450: The Next Step In HTPC Video Cards
by Ryan Smith on February 4, 2010 12:00 AM EST- Posted in
- GPUs
The Test
Due to our improperly clocked reference Radeon HD 5450, all of our performance benchmarks for the 5450 have been taken with our Sapphire 5450 card. As the board is identical to the reference card other than for using the appropriate clock speeds, the results in turn should be identical to a properly clocked reference sample.
We’d also like to thank MSI for sending along one of their GeForce 210 cards, the N210 MD512H. It arrived too late to review it before this article, but we are using it for our GeForce 210 numbers since NVIDIA does not provide reference cards for that series. You’ll see a review of that card in the next day or so.
For the Radeon HD 5450 launch, AMD once again provided new drivers that enable support for it. They’re version 8.69RC3, the same series as the drivers for the 5670 launch.
| CPU: | Intel Core i7-920 @ 3.33GHz |
| Motherboard: | Intel DX58SO (Intel X58) |
| Chipset Drivers: | Intel 9.1.1.1015 (Intel) |
| Hard Disk: | Intel X25-M SSD (80GB) |
| Memory: | Patriot Viper DDR3-1333 3 x 2GB (7-7-7-20) |
| Video Cards: |
AMD Radeon HD 5970 AMD Radeon HD 5870 AMD Radeon HD 5850 AMD Radeon HD 5770 AMD Radeon HD 5750 AMD Radeon HD 5670 512MB AMD Radeon HD 5450 512MB AMD Radeon HD 4890 AMD Radeon HD 4870 1GB AMD Radeon HD 4850 AMD Radeon HD 3870 AMD Radeon HD 4770 AMD Radeon HD 4670 512MB AMD Radeon HD 4550 512MB NVIDIA GeForce GTX 295 NVIDIA GeForce GTX 285 NVIDIA GeForce GTX 275 NVIDIA GeForce GTX 260 Core 216 NVIDIA GeForce GTS 250 NVIDIA GeForce 8800 GT NVIDIA GeForce 9600 GT NVIDIA GeForce GT 240 NVIDIA GeForce GT 220 NVIDIA GeForce 210 |
| Video Drivers: |
NVIDIA ForceWare 190.62 NVIDIA ForceWare 195.62 AMD Catalyst Beta 8.66 AMD Catalyst Beta 8.66.6 AMD Catalyst 9.9 AMD Catalyst Beta 8.69 |
| OS: | Windows 7 Ultimate 64-bit |
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andy o - Thursday, February 4, 2010 - link
[I got an error, so sorry if this is posted twice.]It's not overclocking at all. Powerplay is, as the poster above said, for power efficiency only. It actually doesn't overclock at all, but underclocks when the GPU is not being stressed.
If you're referring to one of the posts that requires you to enable overdrive, notice that it's only being enabled so you can stabilize the clock (and thus effectively disabling powerplay), but the GPU/mem are actually being underclocked by messing with an xml file and lowering the clocks manually via overdrive.
ATWindsor - Thursday, February 4, 2010 - link
First of all, its not really a "audiophile feature" to get audio without droputs and other problems over HDMI, its devastating for the audio, no matter if you are a audiophile or not, secondly, powerplay is also used for power efficiency. The result is that HDMI audio doesn't work with default-setting for many people, this is a pretty major issue.AtW
andy o - Thursday, February 4, 2010 - link
OK so hyperlinks aren' working.This is the first thread I linked.
http://www.avsforum.com/avs-vb/showthread.php?p=17...">http://www.avsforum.com/avs-vb/showthread.php?p=17...
this is the doom9 thread.
http://forum.doom9.org/showthread.php?p=1359418#po...">http://forum.doom9.org/showthread.php?p=1359418#po...
ATI is giving some users the runaround.
ereavis - Thursday, February 4, 2010 - link
try this ATI hotfixhttp://support.amd.com/us/kbarticles/Pages/ATICata...">http://support.amd.com/us/kbarticles/Pages/ATICata...
andy o - Thursday, February 4, 2010 - link
already did, and it's the same with 9.11, 9.12, 9.12 hotfix, 10.1, and version 8.70RC2 (presumably 10.2 RC2).toyota - Thursday, February 4, 2010 - link
am I missing something? why are you saying Far Cry 2 benchmark cant go lower than high settings? all you have to do is select DX9 and you can choose low or medium from there.Ryan Smith - Thursday, February 4, 2010 - link
We stick to DX10 mode for benchmarking DX10-enabled games. In fact I never even tried DX9, otherwise I would have noticed that it goes lower.Humm...
toyota - Thursday, February 4, 2010 - link
well anybody trying to game on this thing will have to use whatever realistic playable settings are available. that means DX9 for Crysis/Warhead and Far Cry 2 would need to be used.andy o - Thursday, February 4, 2010 - link
That option has been there for a while, but there's no info on what exactly it does.Ryan Smith - Thursday, February 4, 2010 - link
Frankly, AMD has never documented it well. It has something to do with working with Windows MMCSS and DXVA to do exactly what the name describes, and that's all I know off-hand.It's aptly named though; I've seen a number of examples where enabling it does what's on the label.