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...

 

Hardware Secrets -- Radeon X1600 XT, formerly known as RV530, is the fastest graphics chip inside the new mid-range graphics chip family from ATI. We’ve got a reference sample for this model from ATI, so we will compare its performance to other members of the Radeon X1000 series, to previous ATI chips and also with competing products from nVidia. The main issue with this video card is that it will reach the market only in December!

Driverheaven -- We have tested ATI's latest with a good cross section of games ranging from current first person shooters such as PREY to Microsoft's upcoming Flight Simulator X and we also pit the board against current ATI and Nvidia hardware to see if its worth an upgrade. We also have information on mixed crossfire configurations, CPU scaling (with a vapochill cooled extreme edition conroe running at 4ghz), as well as game tests running at resolutions up to 2560x1600 on a 30 inch Dell screen. We look at how the card handles against competing boards with optimisations off/HQ enabled. We also overclock the card to see what headroom you can expect.

Driverheaven -- The battle for supremacy in the graphics card arena is as fierce as ever these days, and both companies (nVIDIA and ATI - yes, we'll continue to call it that) are keen to point out their advantages and try to grab as much market share as possible. nVIDIA has stolen the thunder recently with the introduction of the all-powerful 8800 line of cards, but it's the midrange market segment where the battle is usually won or lost for the two companies. The reason is quite simple: although the super high-end cards earn bragging rights, it's the £100 cards and lower that are the best sellers, and in this category both companies want to be able to claim victory. When was the last time a friend approached you because you know more about computers, and asked: "Hey, I would like to buy a new graphics card to play all the latest games with great speeds, and I am prepared to pay good money; up to £100!" I bet that has happened more than once!

Accelenation -- The overhanging VPU cooler on this board necessitates that four of the OCZ RAM sinks are cut down. This can be achieved by hacking off about 5mm from the width of the fins.

Legit Reviews -- The ATI Radeon HD 4550 (RV710) graphics card pictured above measures in at just 6.625" in length and while it is a full height card it shouldn't have any issues fitting in nearly all of the cases on the market today. The very first thing that one notices with this graphics card is the lack of a heat sink and that is because this card only uses 20-25W and doesn't need a fan to keep it cooling. Under the heat spreader is a graphics core that has just 80 stream processors. This is far fewer than the 320 stream processors that can be found on a Radeon HD 4670 graphics card. Even with 80 stream processors the Radeon HD 4550 offers 96 GFLOPS of compute power, which isn't bad considering the MSRP on these cards will be between $45-$55!

Benchmark Reviews -- Coming right on the heels of the HD5800 series launch, ATI brings us another batch of cards based on class-leading 40nm GPUs and GDDR5 memory. The new cards, Radeon HD5770 and HD5750, use the same architecture as the new HD5800 series, but ATI basically cut the Cypress chip in half to create a brand new video card with hardware specs somewhere between an HD4870 and an HD4890. If you're thinking that's not a bad place to be, but want to see some proof of how the HD5770 performs, Benchmark Reviews is pleased to offer you the results of our extensive testing.

Phoronix -- As 2005 comes to an end, both NVIDIA and ATI have both fought a competitive battle not only when it comes to their hardware lineup but also display drivers for alternative operating systems. When discussing this subject matter, GNU/Linux users have been quick to criticize ATI Technologies whether it is due to poor installation support, distribution compatibility, rudimentary control panel, or simply the performance level of its drivers. On the contrary, even though NVIDIA had unveiled its GeForce 7 series, 2005 has not been the best year for the green developers...