ATI Radeon HD 5450 512MB DDR3 Video Card Review

The Radeon HD 5450 Reference Card

The picture above shows the reference Radeon HD 5450 512MB DDR3 edition
video card. The card takes up just a single-slot when it comes to PCI slot brackets, but the passive heat sink does cover up the slot next to it. The Radeon HD 5450 uses just 6.4W at idle and 19.1W at load, so the card does not require any additional power connectors. This is nice for those that are looking to upgrade a PC that
doesn’t have any extra PSU headers for a 6-pin PCIe power cable. The
GPU heat sink is fairly large, but the best part of it is that it makes no noise at all. All of the hot air from the GPU gets recirculated
inside the case, so keep this in mind if you have a chassis with limited
airflow. One thing that stood out to us right away is that the Radeon
HD 5450 512MB reference design graphics card does NOT have any CrossFire
connectors.

The next thing that we noticed it that the card has a low-profile design and came with the smaller PCI bracket in case you wanted to put the card in a SFF chassis. If you want to reduce the height of the card you will need to sacrifice the VGA port and therefore ATI Eyefinity, but that shouldn’t be a big deal to many users as VGA is seldom used on home theater or media PCs.

The back of the ATI Radeon HD 5450 video card lacks the metal
plate found on some cards. The back of the card does contain two DDR3 memory ICs and that is about all that is interesting on the back of the reference design.

The ATI Radeon HD 5450 graphics card has a single dual-link DVI-I output
along with DisplayPort and VGA outputs. We were told by ATI that the
add-in board partners can change this configuration around and that many will have an HDMI port instead of the DisplayPort. If you want to run ATI Eyefinity you must get a card like this as DisplayPort is required for Eyefinity.

The passive heat sink on the Radeon HD 5450 does make it slightly wider than a single-slot, but it fit in all the SFF PCs that we tried it out in that contained motherboards that used just one PCIe slot along the bottom of the board. The heat sink on the Radeon HD 5450 is rather nice looking and features a cool looking design that we just had to take a picture of to show you.