Well crud, anyone want to buy an HD5450?

[James]

I always seem to act right before I should.

My HD5450 is arriving today, and the HD5570 is launched today. Looks like it basically keeps all of the specs of the 5670, but with lower clocks and DDR3 instead of GDDR5

Anandtech HD5570 review

AMD has done 3 things to differentiate the 5570 from the 5670. The first of which is to significantly castrate the 5670’s memory bandwidth. While the 5670 had 1GHz (4GHz effective) GDD5, the 5570 drops that for simple 900MHz (1.8GHz effective) DDR3, giving the card only 45% of the memory bandwidth of the 5670. The second change is more customary, and that is lowering the core clock from 775MHz to 650MHz, leaving the card with roughly 83% of the computational/rendering/texturing performance of the 5670. None of the SIMDs have been disabled however, so this is a fully functional Redwood GPU.

*Edit: Newegg already has stock. Price: $83-$95

**Edit Again: I think I'll actually stick with my HD5450 anyway. Looks like whether it's drivers or a flaw in the cards, AMD has neutered both the 5570 and the 5450 when it comes to video playback, putting them more or less on even ground. That means the deciding factor is power and noise, and the 5450 beats the 5570 hands down.

As a video-only HTPC card, it’s no better than the 5450 in features, while it’s worse in terms of power consumption and noise. Based on our research the 5570 isn’t the HTPC über card we were expecting it to be, so if you can bear the limitations of the 5450, that’s going to be the better card. Otherwise the 5670 is the most capable choice out there. The 5570 does nothing better than either of those two cards when it comes to HTPC use.