Radeon HD 5450: The Reference Card
The Radeon HD 5450 is tiny, easily a half-height card sporting a bundled I/O bracket that can be swapped to fit in full-size enclosures. It is less than seven inches long, and the PCB is less than two and a quarter inches tall.
At first glance, you could almost mistake the new Radeon HD 5450 for the 4550 its replacing. An AMD representative even boasted that the 5450 shares the same dimensions as the 4550, allowing board partners to use the same coolers if they want, keeping costs for new development to a minimum.
The heatsink on the reference card is beefy--likely one of the most attractive looking designs we've seen on a low-end passive card. As you will see in our temperature testing, it also does a more than adequate job of keeping the 5450 GPU cool.
This reference model includes DVI, HDMI, and DisplayPort outputs, but manufacturers will have some leeway as to what to equip. Alternate models will likely come from the factory without a DisplayPort connector, even though this type of configuration would remove the option of a triple-monitor configuration.
It's difficult to believe this tiny GPU carries 292 million transistors. Anyone remember the original Intel Pentium CPU? It consisted of 3.1 million transistors. That means that this miniscule Radeon GPU employs more than 94 times the number of transistors used to build Pentium processors. It boggles the mind.
