ATI Radeon HD 5570 and Radeon HD 5450
The Radeon HD 5570 and Radeon HD 5450 are the budget offerings of the lineup in every sense of the word.
ATI released two more budget-oriented Radeon 5000 series video cards. The Radeon HD 5570 and Radeon HD 5450 roll in at $80 to $85 and $50 to $60, respectively. You'll get all the usual Radeon HD 5000 series goodies--triple monitor support and DirectX11. Just don't count on any of the gaming horsepower to make an appearance.
The Specs:
Radeon HD 5570
650MHz core
400 stream processors
1GB 900MHz DDR3 RAM
Radeon HD 5450
650MHz Core
80 stream processors
512MB/1GB 800MHz DDR3/DDR2 RAM
At first glance, the Radeon HD 5570 seems like it might be a decent contender, but then we encounter the pesky DDR3 problem. The reduced memory bandwidth will nip any performance aspirations in the bud. The Radeon HD 5450, like just about any $50 GPU, gets carved down to the bone. With less than a one-fourth of the cores present on the Radeon HD 5570, it's all down hill.
On the plus side, these lean cards draw almost no power. The Radeon HD 5570 draws 38W and idles under 10W. If that seems low, the Radeon HD 5450 uses even less: 19W under load and 7W at idle. Their miniscule power consumption is also matched by their small physical size and low noise output. Both of the cards are half height, which helps them fit into tight cases. The Radeon HD 5450 doesn't even have a fan, so it's completely silent.
Putting the cards through the paces, we couldn't help but hope for better performance. The specs didn't inspire much, and the tests confirmed it. The 3DMark Vantage GPU score shows the Radeon HD 5670 to be five times faster than the Radeon HD 5450, and almost one-and-a-half times as fast as the Radeon HD 5570. Yes, the Radeon HD 5670 costs twice as much, but when we're down in the $50-to-$100 range, it really pays to save for an extra week or two to get something vastly better. Dirt 2 and Batman showed similar results. To even get Dirt 2 playable on the Radeon HD 5450, we had to set everything to ultra low and kick the resolution down to 1280x768. The Radeon HD 5570 fared slightly better, but it's hardly $20 away from the Radeon HD 5670 and GeForce 9800 GT. Unless your biggest concerns are power and space, do yourself a favor and move up the chain a bit.
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