Benchmark Reviews -- Just when I thought they had finished cutting halves, ATI has taken the 40nm Cypress architecture to a new low. Low power, that is. In a brand new design, unlike anything they have released with this architecture, ATI is going after the Home Theater PC market with their heat sinks blazing. OK, I exaggerate; the Radeon HD5450 video card actually runs pretty cool, which is the point, really. It's silent, too, with a large and lovely red heatsink sitting atop the tiny GPU, sans fan. Follow along with Benchmark Reviews as we investigate an early sample of ATI's new standard bearer for low-power HTPC applications.

 

[H]ard|OCP -- ATI is bringing some new functionality to their Catalyst driver suite with version 5.6. They also give us a look ahead at some upcoming features that will make their way into the software. We cover the notable features of the new Catalyst and where it is heading.

TweakTown -- We will be looking at what GeCube, PowerColor, Sapphire and HIS have to offer us in this low-end department. We will have a quick look at each card, what cooler they use, if there are any significant differences between the cards, along with what is included in the package. We will be throwing in the Crossfire results from the other day just for the heck of it along side our other cards by themselves. Let’s get started and see which manufacturer is offering the best Radeon X1300XT.

Hexus -- Excuses out of the way first, methinks. Yes, we know it's near the end of January 2006. Yes, we know the ATI Radeon X1300 and X1600 series of SKUs launched back in October, along with Radeon X1800. So nearly a quarter to get round to evaluating them pretty much sucks. We know that too, and we apologise. The perils of a million and one other product launches around the same time meant HEXUS.core was tied up doing other things, and analysis of the mid-range and low-end members of the new ATI Radeon X1K family have taken a bit of a back seat.

bit-tech -- Many hardware enthusiasts have been waiting for AMD’s response to Nvidia’s GeForce 8800 family of graphics processors before deciding which company would get their hard earned cash. However, that wait has been a long one – well over six months in fact – and a lot of enthusiasts got fed up and bought a GeForce 8800-series card.

Legit Reviews -- The ATI Radeon HD 5450 graphics card brings full DirectX 11 support, ATI Eyefinity multi-display technology and ATI Stream technology support for less than $60. That sounds great, but in reality the Radeon HD 5450 graphics card wasn't that great in gaming. What the ATI Radeon HD 5450 is good at is a home theater PC (HTPC) or a media PC. The single slot low-profile capable card that we looked at today requires no cooling fan or additional power supply power cables. Since the card is passively-cooled it is silent and the fact that it can do HDMI 1.3a with Dolby TrueHD and DTS-HD Master Audio it is the ideal graphics card for a HTPC. For less than $60 the Radeon HD 5450 video card costs less than HDMI sound cards like the $139 ASUS Xonar HDAV 1.3 Slim HDMI Audio Card that was once needed for DTS-HD Master Audio bitstreaming. Now with a graphics card like the ATI Radeon HD 5450 you get pretty much all the same functionality plus additional GPU features...

Phoronix -- Released from ATI today are the new Windows CATALYST v6.3 display drivers as well as the now monthly Linux fglrx display drivers. The new ATI Linux v8.23.7 display drivers continue to lack X1000 series support but there are a few improvements in this release when it comes to OpenGL, FSAA, and X800/850 compatibility improvements. Today at Phoronix, we have taken these drivers for yet another spin to display its gaming performance abilities on this exciting eve of CeBIT 2006.

Motherboards.org -- Two ATI HD 5850s are definitely better than a single card in almost every game. To take advantage of two cards of this magnitude you almost have to turn up FSAA to 8x and AF to 16x as performance with 4x FSAA is nearly CPU limited on a Core i7 920. Turning up the image quality is a benefit everyone can appreciate as the games are not stressed by two cards at 4X at all. Performance in games increases 30-40% over a single card in every case except Batman Arkham Asylum which has issues running in Crossfire mode. The cost of two HD 5850s if you can find them is $540 on Newegg, meaning it is more expensive than a single HD 5870 but has higher performance and more image quality enhancing features like up to 16x FSAA native.