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.

[kent1146]

If you really don't want your 5450, then just refuse the package when it arrives by UPS or FedEx. It will be returned to NewEgg, and the full price + shipping will be refunded to you.

[wh666-666]

If yopu decide to get rid of it, feel free to sell it to me. Hardware is stupidly expensive here.

[James]

Well, I kept it and installed it last night.

Haven't tried any of the new hardware acceleration stuff yet, but as a general boost it is a welcome addition.

Two things that I thought merited comment:

1. Windows 7 has built in HDMI Audio drivers for an HDMI audio output, sure I still installed the ATI drivers, but it's nice to know that MS has at least thought this through.

2. Definitely a boost over the built in nVidia 9300 IGP I had in the HTPC. General playback is about the same, but some of the higher compression (thus higher processing requirement) videos I have no longer stutter during quick pans, they playback smoothly, similar to how they playback on my main rig.

Card is running cool and silent, can't really ask for more. Only snag I hit was that I had the BIOS set to ignore add-in graphics cards. Had to hook the HDMI cable back to the onboard connection, change the BIOS, then boot back up. After that it was no issues.

[James]

Update:

Turns out the inability to enable VAD on the 5570 was indeed a driver bug. A patch should be available shortly. it has more than enough power to handle it. Also, it turns out that the 5450 can do VAD just fine at any resolution lower than 1920x1200, which includes the standard 1920x1080 of HD displays. Gonna grab a fresh beta of the drivers and play some more this weekend. I still debate whether or not I should have gotten the 5570, but considering at 1920x1200 and lower they are more or less equal, I think I'll be OK with the 5450.

Anandtech Followup on the ATI HTPC card debacle

It turns out that the difference between rendering a 1920x1200 desktop and a 2560x1600 desktop is enough to make the 5450 start dropping frames when Vector Adaptive deinterlacing is in use. If we forced the issue by disabling ESVP, we would see a few frames get dropped in the Cheese Slices test when running at 2560x1600, but not at 1920x1200. This is actually something AMD was aware of, and as we just found out AMD has ESVP disable Vector Adaptive deinterlacing on a 2560x1600 desktop, but leaves it enabled at 1920x1200. Or in other words, the 5450 has enough compute power to do Vector Adaptive deinterlacing at HD desktop resolutions, just not at resolutions above that.