The Ultimate HTPC graphics card - ATI Radeon 5450

Want a graphics card that delivers pure media acceleration without giving 2 cents to gaming? Then you’re prayers have been answered thanks to the ATI Radeon 5450. Here’s the low down:

For $50 (~INR 2500) - You get a DX 11 card, with Eyefinity, UVD2 and HDMI support! To add to it… It’s built on a 40nm die, with a core clock speed of 650MHz and only 80 stream processors. What does this mean? It’s a tiny card, passive cooled, media powerhouse. It has just 12 gigs of memory bandwidth, but 104 GFLOPS of compute performance! Most of the latest onboard graphics cards rate at 40 to 50 GFLOPS - do the math.

Here are the specs:

Here’s what the card looks like:

Here’s a little snippet from the Legit Reviews guys:

Adding the Radeon HD 5450 to the test system (AMD X2) added about 7W to the idle numbers, but actually saved 14W of power during movie playback since it didn’t use as much of the CPU during Blu-ray playback.

The bottom Line:

The ATI Radeon HD 5450 might be the best HTPC graphics card ever made. For less then $60 - you get flawless blu-ray playback with DTS-HD Master Audio bitstreaming!

ATI Radeon HD 4890 Specifications

Stand aside 4870s, the ATI Radeon HD 4890 is here!! The HD 4890 card with 1GB GDDR5 memory is expected to give 124.8 GB/s of memory bandwidth, but the memory interface used for the same hasn’t been confirmed yet. We’re assuming that ATI incorporated a 256-bit memory interface for wider memory bandwidth.

New drivers to unleash the potential of this RV790 chip are expected to wipe out the fuss after the recent benchmarks leak. In terms of pricing, AMD will be priced way far below Nvidia’s high-end GTX 280 graphics card and obviously a bit higher than their existing HD 4870.

The ATI Radeon HD 4890 specs are as follows:

- GPU: RV790 @ 850MHz / 40nm
- Memory: 1024Mb GDDR5 @ 3900MHz
- Shader Processors: 800

Release date: April 6th 2009.

But guess what? ATI has confirmed that when the 4890 launches, the prices for the 4850 and 4870, single and X2 variants will not drop.Having said that, I’d give it a few months depending on how nVidia’s new cards perform and their strategy.

The big question is, how much faster will it be in real world gaming benchmarks, I don’t even look at synthetic tests. April 6th, thy name is ‘too fking far and I can’t wait’.