Pay a little, get a lot—AMD’s HD 5450 and 5470 sub $100 AIBs

Posted by Kathleen Maher on February 16th 2010 | Discuss
Categories: Hardware Review
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AMD’s ATI Radeon HD 5450 with (left) and without fan. (Source: Jon Peddie Research)

AMD introduced two additional add-in boards to their expanding product line for the Value segment putting a virtual strangle hold on the <$100 market.

Radeon HD 5450

The HD 5450 with a 40nm “Cedar” GPU is a sub $60 card set to take the place of its HD 4350/4550 predecessors. To get to this thrifty price point AMD made some significant hardwaremodifications.

AMD cut the cost of manufacturing of the AIB by giving the 5450 a fan-less heat sink which gives the HD 5450 a unique look but also turns this sub $60 AIB into a dual-slot solution. There will be some manufactures like Sapphire which will equip the HD 5450 with a single slot fan-based heat sink.

These single-slot designs with fan assembly might be more desirable to some depending on one’s box configuration. AMD also downgraded the memory, which has been DDR5 since the HD 4000 series were introduced 2008, to DDR2/DDR3. The Cedar GPU is an economical 292 M transistors on a die size of 59mm2.

The HD 5450 is not going to blow you away with its gaming performance—its obviously better equipped to perform to the standards of a casual gamer, however it is outfitted with Eyefinity technology so it will power up to three monitors with a maximum resolution 2560 x 1600 with solid HD video capabilities. The AIB has one DVI port, a VGA port, and a Display Port.

The HD 5450 is remarkably efficient, drawing less than 20W when functioning under stress—key for the value environment.

The Nvidia GT 220 and 210, also built in a 40 nm process, match the HD 5450 performance and price with the GT AIBs touting more favorable fill rates. However, the GT AIBs will draw up to 56 W of power, and still do not support DirectX 11.

Radeon HD 5570

The second AIB from AMD set to launch in the sub $100 segment is the Radeon HD 5570. The HD 5570 is the slimmed down version of the HD 5670. The HD 5670 has the same number of transistors, 627 million, in the 40 nm process, and it equals the 400 stream processors and 20 texture units. The main difference in the two AIBs comes in the form of memory with the HD 5670 coming with the now AMD standard GDDR5 while the thrifty HD 5500 series card has DDR3. The memory clock was also taken down 100 MHz to 900 MHz with the processor clock coming at 650 MHz compared to 775 MHz on the HD 5600 series. The overall footprint of the HD 5570 was cut down to about half the size of the HD 5670 saving a bit on the manufacturing process as well. The HD 5570 is priced roughly $25 to $30 less than the $99 HD 5600 series.

Like all AIBs in the Evergreen GPU family, the HD 5570 can drive up to three monitors with AMD’s Eyefinity technology. The HD 5670 has DVI, VGA and HDMI connections.

FIGURE 2: Pmark results for the AMD Radeon HD 5570 and HD 5450. (Source: Jon Peddie Research)
FIGURE 3: Vantage benchmark results for the AMD Radeon HD 5570 and 5450. (Source: Jon Peddie Research)
FIGURE 4: Resident Evil 5 benchmark results for the AMD Radeon HD 5570 and 5450. (Source: Jon Peddie Research)
FIGURE 5: Stalker—Call of Pripyat benchmark results for the AMD Radeon HD 5570 and 5450. (Source: Jon Peddie Research)

Nvidia’s value offerings. GT 220 and 210, can compete with the HD 5570 on price and performance but again, all of AMD’s cards support DX 11 and multi-monitor options, and use less power.

In testing, you can see a significant performance drop with the HD 5400 series, which is expected given the price point and architectural differences.

Benchmarks

We ran three sets of benchmarks on the new value segment AIBs from AMD, Vantage (also used for calculating the Pmark), the popular Resident Evil 5, and the DirectX 11 benchmark Stalker—Call of Pripyat.

All the tests were run on an Intel Clarksdale corei5 3.33 GHz-based computer with 4GB RAM.

Pmark

The combination of price, power consumption, and performance is expressed in the Pmark.

As might be expected, the lower power and lower priced HD 5450 got the best Pmark score.

Vantage

The industry standard synthetic benchmark is still Futuremark’s 3Dmark Vantage test suite.

We had difficulty getting the HD 5450 to run at the higher (1680 x 1050, and 1920 x 1200) resolutions with anti-aliasing on. However, in other tests the AIB ran fine at those resolutions. The HD 5570 significantly (average 456%) outperformed the HD 5450 and so once again if power consumption and/or price are not the main criteria, then the HD 5570 is the better choice.

Resident Evil 5

This game is chosen because it is popular, has a built-in benchmark, and uses DirectX 10 and DirectX 11; however, for these tests we only used DirectX 10.

The Radeon HD 5450 was not good enough to run the benchmark (and therefore presumably the game) at a minimal acceptable frame rate (i.e., ≥ 30 fps.) The HD 5570 could only run at the minimal acceptable frame rate at lower resolutions with anti-aliasing turned on, and did alright at higher resolutions with AA turned off.

Stalker—Call of Pripyat

Jon’s current favorite game and one that offers the most detailed test information other than Unigine is Stalker—Call of Pripyat.

Stalker gives you different levels of DirectX, multiple test scenarios with nineteen resolutions, six render lighting modalities, and four environment conditions (with a Min., Ave., and Max measurement) to evaluate an AIB resulting in 1,368 possible test conditions—overwhelming to say the least. The test scores are in fps, and they are similar in results to what we found in with Resident Evil 5.

What do we think?

The AMD ATI Radeon HD 5450 is a very capable AIB for casual games and could even be used in some high-end FPS game. The HD 5570, which costs just a little more than the 5540 is capable of running high-end games. For sub $100 that’s an amazing value.

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