Last week we pointed out that you could buy a AMD Radeon HD 5450 for $54 even though it had not been officially released yet. Today is the release day, and now you can see what that $54 card is worth. Anandtech has published their review of the 5450. They compare it to a suite of cards both from AMD (including the 4000 and 5000 series) and NVidia (including the GTX 200 series). For the price, the card holds up fairly well. It will not beat a GTX 295 in games, but then again it is not meant to. The 5450 has 20% of the shaders of the Radeon 5670, consumes just 19.1 Watts at load, and consumes 6.4 Watts at idle. The card is produced for the HTPC community, and those who want a passively cooled graphics card. From the conclusion to the article:
With the first Cedar card launched, now we’re going have a chance to see how AMD chooses to fill in the obvious gaps in their pricing structure, and more importantly how NVIDIA will ultimately end up responding to a fully launched 5000-series.
As we have said before, we expect the Radeon 5570 to launch in February, perhaps as early as next week. The 5570 comes with either 512 MB or 1 GB of memory running at 900 MHz, and 400 shaders running at 650 MHz.
