The Radeon HD 5450 and 5570 Cards
The Radeon HD 5450 Graphics CardThe Radeon HD 5450 is a half-height graphics card that is passive and should fit perfectly into most users HTPC designs.
Though a far cry from the cooler designs seen in the HD 5800-series of graphics cards, the bright red on the heatsink is rather attractive.
Of course with such low power consumption the need for any kind of external power connection is negated. You should note that in this reference design the cooler does take up more than one slot of space inside your case; check the particular card you might be buying for that consideration.
The three connections on the Radeon HD 5450 include a VGA port, DisplayPort and dual-link DVI. You might wonder why AMD would not include an HDMI port on the card that is obviously meant for the HTPC market, even though the DVI-to-HDMI adapters will still work just fine here. The answer of course is that Eyefinity would not be an option without the DisplayPort connection; in this case you can actually connect three displays to a $59 graphics cards – pretty amazing considering you are still limited to two monitors on even NVIDIA’s highest end offerings.
As a half height graphics card, AMD provided a smaller connection bracket that omits the VGA output.
Finally, I have included a shot of the die on the Cedar-core based HD 5450; compare it to the HD 5870 GPU seen at the bottom of the page here. Nope, not a different size quarter – just a greatly reduced size GPU for the lower cost option.
The Radeon HD 5570 Graphics Card
You can see, compared to the die shot of the HD 5450 above, the HD 5570 core is noticeably larger but still much smaller than the other GPUs in the 5000-series family.
The Radeon HD 5570 Graphics Card
The HD 5570 maintains our half-height status but replaces the passive heatsink for an active cooling solution using the same black-on-red theme that the rest of the HD 5000-series has used.
The HD 5570 doesn’t require an external power connection either.
The HD 5570 differs from the HD 5450 in its connection configuration: it replaces the DisplayPort with an HDMI port. This means however that you will not be able to connect three displays to THIS particular iteration of the HD 5570 though other vendor’s designs might differ.
