ATI Radeon HD 5450: DX11 On The Cheap

Over the course of the past four months or so, AMD has been on a tear, releasing a slew of new DirectX 11-class GPUs at price points ranging from approximately $600 all the way on down to about $100. All the while, AMD was also up front about the release schedule for many upcoming, future products. If you remember back to some of our previous Radeon HD 5000 series coverage, we showed you a picture of this slide, that outlined AMD's plans to launch the GPUs codenamed Redwood and Cedar sometime in Q1 2010. Redwood became the Radeon HD 5670 and today we can finally spill the beans on the first iteration of Cedar.

Now, 135 days after the arrival of the Radeon HD 5870, AMD is at the ready with the antithesis of that card, the Radeon HD 5450. Whereas the Radeon HD 5870 is AMD's fastest and most powerful single GPU, the Radeon HD 5450 is the low-power, entry-level variant of the Radeon HD 5000 series GPU architecture. As you'd probably expect, the Radeon HD 5450 supports DX11 (of course), along with ATI Eyefinity technology, AVIVO, PowerPlay and all of the other features inherent to the HD 5000 series. Take a peek at the specs below to familiarize yourself with the card and then we'll move on to the fun stuff.

The Half-Height, Passively Cooled, ATI Radeon HD 5450

A lot of groundwork had to be laid over the preceding months and even years before AMD could produce the entire Radeon HD 5000 series of products. Although the GPU at the heart of the Radeon HD 5450 is based on the same architecture as the other members of the DX-11 class Radeon HD 5000 series, the chip does leverage technologies already implemented in previously released GPU generations, so it's not all new.  As such, we'd recommend perusing some recent HotHardware articles to brush up on a few of the technologies and features employed by the new Radeon HD 5450...

• AMD ATI Radeon HD 5870: Unquestionably Number One
• ATI Radeon HD 4890: The RV790 Unveiled
• ATI Radeon HD 4870 X2 - AMD Back On Top
• ATI Radeon HD 4850 and 4870: RV770 Has Arrived
• ATI Radeon HD 3870 and 3850: 55nm RV670
• ATI Catalyst Driver Analysis: CrossFireX and More
• AMD Hybrid CrossFire Sneak Peek

The articles listed above cover many of the features available with the Radeon HD 5450, like the UVD 2 video engine, Catalyst Control Center, PowerPlay, GDDR5 memory, and more. There are also, however, many brand new things that were introduced with the Radeon HD 5800 series that we detailed in our Radeon HD 5870 coverage, so that article at the very least is a must-read companion to this one - well, if you're up for some extra bedtime reading anyway.