A Radeon For The Rest Of Us?
AMD floored us with the performance (and price) of its Radeon HD 5970, awed us with the 5870's triple-display Eyefinity capabilities, wowed us with the 5850's value, excited us with the 5770's alacrity in a home theater system, impressed us with its mainstream 5750, and intrigued us with the relatively entry-level 5670.
We have written quite a few Radeon HD 5000-series launch reviews over the past few months, and every one of the company's new products has demonstrated serious gaming prowess to its respective price segment.
Every one of them, that is, until now. Enter ATI's Radeon HD 5450. This is not a piece of hardware that targets our gaming audience. But at $50, it's the Radeon HD 5000-series card for the rest of us. I use the term 'us' somewhat loosely here, as I consider myself a gamer. You get the idea, though.
If you've been paying attention to the recent Radeon launches, then you know there's a lot more to like than just gaming performance: the Eyefinity multi-monitor support and Dolby TrueHD/DTS-HD Master Audio over a protected audio path features mentioned above actually carry over across all members of the 5000-series seen thus far. Anyone excited by those value-adds thus far will be happy to see that they are once again exposed on today's replacement of the Radeon HD 4350 and 4550 cards.
Let's take a closer look at the new Radeon HD 5450 and draw some conclusions about how well it serves that low-end discrete audience. We know it's not a gaming card, but we cant help ourselves; we'll even check out gaming performance for the sake of being thorough.