AMD lets loose its HD 5450

Introducing the last and the least of AMD's Evergreen range.

Today sees the launch of AMD's last and lightest member of its Evergreen family of GPUs.

Codenamed 'Cedar', the 59mm2 chip now known as the ATI Radeon HD 5450 will be the little engine that could. That is, it could do HTPC and casual gaming, but that's just about it.

The HD 5450 lands to replace the HD 4350 discrete graphics chip. In terms of performance you shouldn't expect too much of a surprise. It does, after all, come with a MSRP of $US60.

So what's new? AMD's engineers hacked the core down to just 80 stream processors, plugged a 64-bit memory interface onto the card and hooked up 512MB of GDDR3 - the usual low-end value formula. It doesn't seem like much, does it? Well, it isn't much, but AMD is waving two enormous flags at consumers - DX11 support and low power consumption.

If you really want DX11 we'd recommend you look higher up the food chain, as this is hardly playable lest you go to really low resolutions. However, in terms of power consumption, it's the one. It would be a shoe-in for HTPC GPU of the Year, if such an award existed.

AMD says its new chip is extremely light on its toes and draws just 19.1W in full swing and only 6.4W at idle. This is so light, in fact, that it won't even need a fan to keep it cool.

This brings us to another point, HTPCs.

Considering the fact that HTPCs are increasingly sophisticated beasts of HD burden, the ATI Radeon HD 5450 will power your living room PC, be quiet about it and still allow you to play some casual games.

The HD 5450 also sports all the marketing keywords you'll find in AMD's playbook (with a few caveats, so we've been told): Eyefinity, it'll power three displays, yes, but you'll need the non-included adapter plug; ATI Stream, a rather handicapped version of it, as the chip had its GPGPU bits redesigned and is a bit lacking in performance, and; CrossfireX, which is done via the PCIe bus rather than through a bridge.

Why would you buy one? Who knows why, but we can see where there's a niche for it. Now if only the partners made it with a half-height bracket, a single-height cooler and included the Eyefinity dongle.