ATI Radeon HD5450 Video Card Review

Just when I thought they had finished cutting halves, ATI has taken the 40nm Cypress architecture to a new low. Low power, that is. In a brand new design, unlike anything they have released with this architecture, ATI is going after the Home Theater PC market with their heat sinks blazing. OK, I exaggerate; the Radeon HD5450 video card actually runs pretty cool, which is the point, really. It’s silent, too, with a large and lovely red heatsink sitting atop the tiny GPU, sans fan. Follow along with Benchmark Reviews as we investigate an early sample of ATI’s new standard bearer for low-power HTPC applications.

With the architecture it inherits from the Cypress, the ATI HD5450 has all the modern features that the larger GPU brings to the table. However, sporting only 292 million transistors, including just 80 Stream Processors, the new card idles along at 6.4 watts and never pulls more than 20 watts; no matter how hard you drive it. They’ve even managed to do this without the energy-saving benefits of GDDR5 this time, as the card will be equipped with GDDR3 or GDDR2, depending on the model and preference of the AIB partner.

The flagship ATI video cards made a huge splash in September, but according to Mercury Research, cards costing over $200 only make up 7% of the market, and the 57xx series landed in the $100-$200 range, which makes up 27% of the market. That leaves a huge opening in the sub-$100 market, and ATI is filling in the gaps with all new, DirectX 11 capable cards in this segment. The specs of the HD5450 indicate a performance level that will struggle with gaming, even at moderate resolution, but will have no problem supporting all the latest application in the home theater environment.

About the company: ATI

Over the course of AMD’s four decades in business, silicon and software have become the steel and plastic of the worldwide digital economy. Technology companies have become global pacesetters, making technical advances at a prodigious rate – always driving the industry to deliver more and more, faster and faster.

However, “technology for technology’s sake” is not the way we do business at AMD. Our history is marked by a commitment to innovation that’s truly useful for customers – putting the real needs of people ahead of technical one-upmanship. AMD founder Jerry Sanders has always maintained that “customers should come first, at every stage of a company’s activities.” We believe our company history bears that out.

Radeon HD5450 Features

The feature set of the ATI HD5450 video card is nearly identical to the entire HD5xxx series. The important differences are all related to the fact that the HD5450 chip is half the size of the HD5670, with half the transistors and a small fraction of the processing power. For those who first saw the monster version of this graphic at the launch of the 58xx series, it’s amazing how little is left in the center of the diagram; only 2 SIMD Engines with a total of 80 Stream Processors. Rest assured; the architecture diagram may have gotten smaller, but the feature list hasn’t shrunk at all.

ATI Radeon HD 5450 GPU Feature Summary

• 292 million 40nm transistors
• TeraScale 2 Unified Processing Architecture
  • 80 Stream Processing Units
  • 8 Texture Units
  • 16 Z/Stencil ROP Units
  • 4 Color ROP Units
• GDDR2/3 memory interface
• PCI Express 2.1 x16 bus interface
• DirectX® 11 support
  • Shader Model 5.0
  • DirectCompute11
  • Programmable hardware tessellation unit
  • Accelerated multi-threading
  • HDR texture compression
  • Order-independent transparency
• OpenGL 3.2 support₁
• Image quality enhancement technology
  • Up to 24x multi-sample and super-sample anti-aliasing modes
  • Adaptive anti-aliasing
  • 16x angle independent anisotropic texture filtering
  • 128-bit floating point HDR rendering
• ATI Eyefinity multi-display technology_2,3
  • Three independent display controllers – Drive three displays simultaneously with independent resolutions, refresh rates, color controls, and video overlays
  • Display grouping – Combine multiple displays to behave like a single large display
• ATI Stream acceleration technology
  • OpenCL 1.0 compliant
  • DirectCompute11
  • Accelerated video encoding, transcoding, and upscaling_4,5
  • Native support for common video encoding instructions
• ATI CrossFireX multi-GPU technology₆
  • Dual GPU scaling
• ATI Avivo HD Video & Display technology₇
  • UVD 2 dedicated video playback accelerator
  • Advanced post-processing and scaling₈
  • Dynamic contrast enhancement and color correction
  • Brighter whites processing (blue stretch)
  • Independent video gamma control
  • Dynamic video range control
  • Support for H.264, VC-1, and MPEG-2
  • Dual-stream 1080p playback support_9,10
  • DXVA 1.0 & 2.0 support
  • Integrated dual-link DVI output with HDCP₁₁
    • Max resolution: 2560×1600₁₂
  • Integrated DisplayPort output
    • Max resolution: 2560×1600₁₂
  • Integrated HDMI 1.3 output with Deep Color, xvYCC wide gamut support, and high bit-rate audio
    • Max resolution: 1920×1200₁₂
  • Integrated VGA output
    • Max resolution: 2048×1536₁₂
  • 3D stereoscopic display/glasses support₁₃
  • Integrated HD audio controller
    • Output protected high bit rate 7.1 channel surround sound over HDMI with no additional cables required
    • Supports AC-3, AAC, Dolby TrueHD and DTS Master Audio formats
• ATI PowerPlay^TM power management technology₇
  • Dynamic power management with low power idle state
  • Ultra-low power state support for multi-GPU configurations
• Certified drivers for Windows 7, Windows Vista, and Windows XP

1. Driver support scheduled for release in 2010
2. Driver version 8.66 (Catalyst 9.10) or above is required to support ATI Eyefinity technology and to enable a third display you require one panel with a DisplayPort connector
3. ATI Eyefinity technology works with games that support non-standard aspect ratios which is required for panning across three displays
4. Requires application support for ATI Stream technology
5. Digital rights management restrictions may apply
6. ATI CrossFireX technology requires an ATI CrossFireX Ready motherboard, an ATI CrossFireX Bridge Interconnect for each additional graphics card) and may require a specialized power supply
7. ATI PowerPlay, ATI Avivo and ATI Stream are technology platforms that include a broad set of capabilities offered by certain ATI Radeon HD GPUs. Not all products have all features and full enablement of some capabilities and may require complementary products
8. Upscaling subject to available monitor resolution
9. Blu-ray or HD DVD drive and HD monitor required
10. Requires Blu-ray movie disc supporting dual 1080p streams
11. Playing HDCP content requires additional HDCP ready components, including but not limited to an HDCP ready monitor, Blu-ray or HD DVD disc drive, multimedia application and computer operating system.
12. Some custom resolutions require user configuration
13. Requires 3D Stereo drivers, glasses, and display

Now that we’ve confirmed that the 5450 is not missing any important features, let’s look at the hardware specifications in detail.

Radeon HD5450 Video Card Specifications

I mentioned in the introduction that the HD5450 had hardware specs well below anything we’ve seen so far in the HD5xxx series. You can see the HD5450 specs in detail a little further below, and they’re nothing to brag about, compared to the HD5670, until you get down to the power numbers. Then, it starts to make sense, as ATI has done everything they possibly could to get these numbers down to where they are. In a typical HTPC box, everything is jammed in tighter than sardines in a can, and the low profile of the sleek, shiny chassis only allows for small fans on the back. So, power is King. If the device consumes power, it had better do something useful with it, and not just dissipate it away, as waste heat! While the specs give us a good clue to the performance of the HD5450, ultimately, it’s the real-world performance we care about, the design tradeoffs that were required to achieve it, and the price for that performance. This graphic puts the general pricing v. performance strategy in perspective:

But before we get to our detailed teardown and testing, let’s look at the actual HD5450 specs:

Radeon HD5450 Specifications

• Engine clock speed: 650 MHz
• Processing power (single precision): 104 GigaFLOPS
• Texel fill rate (bilinear filtered): 5.2 Gigatexels/sec
• Pixel fill rate: 2.6 Gigapixels/sec
• Anti-aliased pixel fill rate: 10.4 Gigasamples/sec
• Memory clock speed: 800 MHz
• Memory data rate: 1.8 Gbps
• Memory bandwidth: 12.8 GB/sec
• Maximum board power: 19.1 Watts
• Idle board power: 6.4 Watts

OK, tired of looking at numbers, let’s take a closer look at the hardware, then? ATI was kind enough to send us a sample of the 512MB reference design video card with passive cooling, so let’s examine the ins and outs.

Closer Look: Radeon HD5450

The HD5450 is a radically different design from the previous HD5xxx video cards. From several perspectives, the intended application for this diminutive card has driven a different approach. Physically, everything is smaller, to accommodate usage in low-profile HTPC cases. The sample card I received has a full height I/O bracket, but the DE15HD VGA connector is wired with ribbon cable and is removable, or it can be relocated to an adjacent slot. This way, the card can be easily reconfigured to a true half-height form factor. The card itself is only about an inch longer than the PCI-e interface that it connects to.

Power consumption is at an all-time low, primarily to avoid generating heat. Again, this is an optimum solution for HTPC, where lower power means less ventilation and, ultimately, less overall noise. The video card we’re looking at here is passively cooled, with a lovely red anodized heat sink that is reminiscent of the ASUS ROG heat sinks, used on their gaming oriented motherboards. ATI’s AIB partners will have considerable flexibility for their cooling solutions, allowing them to optimize their offerings along several product pathways. I expect some fan-cooled designs to be recycled, in order to reduce costs, where possible. But for now, we can gaze upon one of the most attractive passive cooling solutions I’ve seen on a video card.

The connections on the I/O plate at the rear of the card are arranged in a common configuration for this class of video card. From left to right: one VGA, one HDMI and one DVI connector – one for everyone. This card did not have a DisplayPort connection, which is required for a three monitor Eyefinity setup. There will be some flexibility in the I/O port arrangement for ATI partners, so pay attention to the product specs when you buy, as it can be hard to tell the HDMI and DisplayPort connections apart with a casual glance.

One thing that becomes obvious when looking at the end-on image above is that this particular passive cooling hardware consumes more than one expansion slot. That may be an issue for some, but remember, there will be a variety of options available from the AIB partners.

The back of the Radeon HD5450 is not quite as densely packed as some of the uber-cards we test here at Benchmark Reviews, but it’s about half-filled with miniature surface-mount-technology components. The main feature to be seen here is the metal cross-brace for the GPU heatsink screws, which are spring loaded, and connect to threaded standoffs on the heat sink assembly on the front side of the card. Also, note that back side DRAM is used, even for the 512MB version of the card.

For most high-end video cards, the cooling system is an integral part of the performance envelope for the card. Make it run cooler, and you can make it run faster was always the byword for achieving gaming-class performance from the latest and greatest GPU. The HD5450 takes a completely different path, more appropriate for the HTPC application it will most likely be used for. By greatly reducing the number of Stream Processors and ROP units, they have built a GPU that consumes so little power, and generates so little waste heat, that cooling is not the limiting factor in performance.

That’s all there really is to see on the outside, so let’s peel back the covers and have a good look around on the inside.

Radeon HD5450 Detailed Features

The big news about the HD5450 is the reduced size of the GPU die. Once again, the newest member of the HD5xxx family has roughly half the number of transistors as the previous one. The chip in the HD5450 is codenamed “Cedar”, and has approximately 292 million transistors on it, compared to 627 million on the Redwood chip, which was released last month with the HD5670. The small size is critical to the cost strategy that ATI is pursuing with all these new releases. After some very lean years, struggling to make it in the graphics chip industry, it appears ATI has finally figured out how to make money.

The Cedar die packaging on the HD5450 GPU is a little bigger than half of the Redwood, because the number of interconnects is roughly the same, with the notable exception of the memory interface, which is 64 bits wide this time. The number of Stream Processors has been radically reduced, from 400 down to 80; only 20% of the number present on the Redwood chips. It’s evident there are a lot of transistors consumed in the other functions of the GPU, besides shaders.

The memory specification is going to be somewhat flexible for the HD54xx products. I expect most units will be sold with 512MB of GDDR3, but GDDR2 is a possibility, perhaps for OEM variants. 1 GB versions will also be available, although it may be tough to make the case for any performance advantage to be had with that configuration, with the exception of Eyefinity usage. As mentioned above, the GPU-memory interface is 64 bits wide with a maximum bandwidth of 12.8 GB/s, using GDDR3. That’s a major hit, compared to the HD5670, with 64GB/s of bandwidth, but I suspect it’s well balanced by the greatly reduced number of Stream Processors.

The K4W1G1646E-HC11 GDDR3 memory chips are sourced from Samsung. They are rated for a maximum clock rate of 900 MHz, and the marketing specs for the card indicate a maximum clock rate of 800 MHz. Version 0.3.8 of GPU-Z reported that the memory on my sample unit was running at 900 MHz. That’s engineering samples for you…. I was suspicious that the clock rate is not being reported correctly in GPU-Z, since it has not been updated to support this new chip yet, but ATI confirmed that they had been building some “extra curricular” prototypes for testing, and some of them got into reviewer’s hands. Oh well; their loss and my gain, I guess. Too bad they didn’t send me some 1 GHz parts, as they are available from Samsung, according to the product specs shown here below.

The power section of the HD5450 video card is simplistic, and optimized for both cost and low power. In this case, all of the dynamic performance scaling is built into the GPU, and the voltage regulators just ride along. I was observing the shader and memory clocks in GPU-Z while using the PC for normal office-type duties, and this card ramped the clocks up and down faster and more dramatically than any card I’ve used recently. That’s where the power savings are going to be made with this card, getting it down very quickly to idle power, which is a miserly 6.4 watts.

Looking at the business end of the passive cooling, I found something that made my mechanical engineering heart shiver. That little square platform, located between the four threaded standoffs, is created by cutting away all the aluminum around it with a milling machine. Then the platform itself is milled to create the flat, smooth surface we all know is essential for good heat transfer from the mirror surface of the GPU. The word you should be thinking is, “Expensive”. I’m pretty sure that the way the GPU chip is mounted on the board makes this expensive manufacturing step essential, and I’m also sure that somewhere there are a couple electronics packaging engineers delivering some serious noogies to the PC Board designer that made all this necessary.

The assembly quality is quite good, for an engineering sample. The heat sink had a bit of a gouge in it, but it was put there before the part was anodized, so it doesn’t stick out too much. The soldering and surface mount component placement was reasonably well done, and the overall board layout was well designed, with a rational flow.

Before we dive into the testing portion of the review, let’s look at one of the most exciting new features available on every Radeon HD5xxx series product, Eyefinity.

ATI Radeon HD5450 Temperature

It’s hard to know exactly when the first video card got overclocked, and by whom. What we do know is that it’s hard to imagine a computer enthusiast or gamer today that doesn’t overclock their hardware. Of course, not every video card has the head room. Some products run so hot that they can’t suffer any higher temperatures than they generate straight from the factory. This is why we measure the operating temperature of the video card products we test.

To begin testing, I use GPU-Z to measure the temperature at idle as reported by the GPU. Next I use FurMark 1.7.0 to generate maximum thermal load and record GPU temperatures at high-power 3D mode. The ambient room temperature remained stable at 23C throughout testing. The ATI Radeon HD5450 video card recorded 30C in idle 2D mode, and increased to 43C after 20 minutes of stability testing in full 3D mode, at 1920×1200 resolution and the maximum MSAA setting of 8X. Obviously, there were no fan settings for this test, but the case I tested in has a large side panel fan.

43C is an impressive result for temperature stress testing, especially for a card that relies on passive cooling. This is a key performance measure for a card like this, and it delivers the goods.

FurMark is an OpenGL benchmark that heavily stresses and overheats the graphics card with fur rendering. The benchmark offers several options allowing the user to tweak the rendering: fullscreen / windowed mode, MSAA selection, window size, duration. The benchmark also includes a GPU Burner mode (stability test). FurMark requires an OpenGL 2.0 compliant graphics card with lot of GPU power! As an oZone3D.net partner, Benchmark Reviews offers a free download of FurMark to our visitors.

FurMark does do two things extremely well: drive the thermal output of any graphics processor higher than any other application or video game, and it does so with consistency every time. While FurMark is not a true benchmark tool for comparing different video cards, it still works well to compare one product against itself using different drivers or clock speeds, or testing the stability of a GPU, as it raises the temperatures higher than any program. But in the end, it’s a rather limited tool.

In our next section, we discuss electrical power consumption and learn how well (or poorly) each video card will impact your utility bill…

Radeon HD5450 Final Thoughts

Most everyone who reads this site is familiar with the concept of diminishing returns. As you get closer to the highest level of performance (let’s call that 100 %…), it costs considerably more to get the last 10% of performance than it does to go from 80% to 90%. When you look at two gaming-class video cards using the same technology, the increase in frames-per-second doesn’t match the increase in price. The HD5850 and the HD5870 are a good example; does the 33% increase in price give you a 33% increase in performance? You wish…..which is why lots more people are buying the HD5850.

Just as the law of diminishing returns works on the high end of the market, there is a corresponding force at work on the lower end of the scale. As you move closer to the lowest possible cost, you start to bounce up against fixed costs that won’t budge. Marketing, sales, design, testing, certification processes, transportation, packaging, and connector costs are all stubbornly rigid. Right now, the cheapest cards at Newegg, based on NVIDIA and ATI chips are the 8400GS and HD4350, priced at $30 and $36, respectively. I dare say, we’re not going to see any new cards introduced that will be any cheaper than these are; it’s just not fiscally possible, if we assume that the vendor is going to make a profit.

My point is, the vendor can try and cut every possible feature, performance enhancing hardware, included software, industrial design, packaging costs, etc. and end up with a product that barely functions, and it would still probably cost $25 on the retailer’s shelf.

In my review of the HD5670, I wondered out loud, “How many more times ATI can slice the pie and still come up with a fully functional video card? Could there be one more cut, for an ultra-low power solution? But I think this is probably it, for a card that can honestly support gaming applications as well as general usage and HD video.” As it turns out, the Radeon HD5450 is that fully functional low-power card, and I still think the Redwood class of ATI GPUs is the lowest you can go and still support modern games. The game changes when you look at HD video, however. This card eats it up for breakfast, and still has some headroom left over for whatever HW acceleration scheme comes along next.

As I sit here on the edge of my chair, waiting for dribs and drabs of information about the latest monster-sized GPU chip from NVIDIA (…hey, they named them this week. Wow), with a die size approaching the dimensions of the original Post-It note, I did wonder what the attraction was to a discrete graphics card with a GPU that’s less than half the size of a US dime. The answer is that even the best Integrated Graphics Processor (IGP) is still less than half as powerful as the Radeon HD5450, and they generally max out with 128MB of SidePort GDDR3 memory. Many of them struggle to render full HD 1080P video smoothly, and the CPUs that they are bundled with usually can’t help the effort much.

So, grab that old microATX board out of the closet, dust it off, add the Radeon HD5450, drop it into a shiny new, slim line HTPC box and you’re off to the movies in style.

ATI Radeon HD5450 Conclusion

Looking at the performance of the ATI Radeon HD5450, you have to give up the idea that this is going to be any kind of solution for a gaming rig. In modern FPS games, it was well below any reasonable person’s expectation for visual quality. Even at the reduced resolutions and quality levels that we introduced in our review of the HD5670 and GT240, the HD5450 just barely got into double digits for frames-per-second. This card is not really practical as a multi-purpose solution. We’ll have to wait a bit for the HD55xx to see if it’s possible to successfully bridge the two requirements of gaming and video playback. The strength of the HD5450 lies in Home Theater PC usage only, where it performs superbly. ATI is currently leading the game in image quality for HD video, and this small, low power, silent and cool board supports all the latest software enhancements that make those improved visuals possible.

The appearance of the passively cooled HD5450 is visually stunning. There are some really ugly passive cards out there, along with a few decent looking ones, but nothing comes close to the design statement that this one makes. AIB partners will have pretty much total flexibility to implement their own cooling systems, and I don’t expect any one of them to top this. Batmobile indeed; this one is fine art, of the industrial design variety.

The build quality of the Radeon HD5450 was quite good, for an engineering sample. The parts were all high quality, the soldering and component placement were to a high standard, and the heat sink was manufactured and assembled perfectly.

The features of the HD5450 have been carried over in full measure from the very first HD58xx series: DirectX 11, Full ATI Eyefinity Support, ATI Stream Technology Support, DirectCompute 11 and OpenCL Support, HDMI 1.3a with Dolby True HD and DTS Master Audio. Nothing was left out on this card, despite it being produced for a clearly different role than the original barn burner gaming cards. Even though this card will not thrive in a multi-functional role, it still provides a solid HTPC experience and is a considerable upgrade for many systems still relying on IGP.

As of March 2010 there are several models available at different prices for the Radeon HD 5450, depending on DRAM configuration and cooling solution. PowerColor offers the AX5450 for $40, while the Sapphire 100291L lists for $43 and XFX HD5450 sells for $50. This is a small price premium from the lowest priced cards available from our favorite e-tailer, but launch pricing is always a bit high, for obvious reasons. We saw in our gaming tests that it takes an extra $50-70 to get decent results with challenging titles, but the extra performance also buys you higher power requirements, more noise and more heat.

The ATI Radeon HD5450 earns a Silver Tachometer Award, because there are some buyers that absolutely demand a passively cooled, completely silent video card, and they also need that card to support the latest technology and features for HD video playback. Until now, those two requirements were mutually exclusive; now there is a product; the one and only product, which completely meets their needs. The fact that it’s impossible to build a dual-use card with 40nm technology that does all that and can play FPS games convincingly is a shame. Fortunately, we’ll only have to wait a year or so, to see what 28nm GPUs can do.

Pros:

+ Modern feature set
+ Extremely low power consumption
+ Aggressive power modulation of GPU and RAM
+ Best video quality currently available
+ HDMI, VGA and DVI interfaces on single slot
+ Cool, silent operation
+ Truly awesome looks
+ Very low heat generation

Cons:

- High-end gaming titles are almost impossible to play
- AIB partners will probably mess with the good looks

Ratings:

• Performance: 8.50
• Appearance: 9.75
• Construction: 9.25
• Functionality: 8.75
• Value: 8.50

Final Score: 8.95 out of 10.

Source: http://benchmarkreviews.com/index.php?option=com_content&task=view&id=455&Itemid=72