ATI Radeon HD 5450: DX11 On The Cheap

Looking back at the gaming performance of the Radeon HD 5450, it's obvious this card wasn't designed to please hardcore gamers. However, it's half-height form factor and passive cooling are sure to appeal the HTPC crowd. With that in mind we also tested the 5450 in a number of scenarios, playing back DVDs, Blu-Ray discs, MOV files, and ripped M2TS files.

The Radeon HD 5450 was flawless during playback of all video types and CPU utilization was extremely low (as you can see in the screen-cap above). In addition, we should note that Adode now supports GPU acceleration of Flash video and the 5450 also performed well playing back HD vids from Hulu, Youtube and the like.

Before bringing this article to a close, we'd like to cover a few final data points--namely power consumption and noise. Throughout all of our benchmarking and testing, we monitored how much power our test system was consuming using a power meter. Our goal was to give you all an idea as to how much power each configuration used while idling and while under a heavy workload. Please keep in mind that we were testing total system power consumption at the outlet here, not just the power being drawn by the graphics cards alone.
 

As you can see, the new Radeon HD 5450 is quite power friendly. The card put up the lowest power consumption scores at both idle and while under load.