AMD Radeon HD 5570 and 5450 Review – DX11 HTPC Goodness

Performance Testing – HD 5450

Our GPU-Z image shows us almost all of the same specifications we expected to see but one – the memory clock is running at 900 MHz as opposed to the 800 MHz stated on the previous pages.  Why?  AMD says it was an honest mistake on their part and that even though they are sticking with the 800 MHz reference settings that many of their partners will likely overclock the memory and core clock speeds.  Regardless, we only expect the performance difference between the two memory settings to be something less than 5%.  We’ll make notes during performance testing and necessary. 


For our comparisons we are going to be throwing the new Radeon HD 5450, with an estimated pricing of $49-59, against the NVIDIA GeForce 210 and GeForce GT 220, available at prices ranging from $49-69.  The GT 220 can definitely be considered a “step above” the price levels of the GeForce 210 and HD 5450 but I thought it was relevant to show our readers what they could get with just a bit more investment. 

The Radeon HD 5570 will be compared against the similarly priced NVIDIA GeForce GT 240 offering and both of these test configurations will be run at slightly higher image quality settings (AA enabled, etc).  Just keep that in mind.

Here is our test system setup for the benchmarks:

• Testing Configuration
• ASUS P6T6 WS Revolution X58 + nForce 200
• Intel Core i7-965 @ 3.33 GHz
• 3 x 2GB Corsair DDR3-1333 MHz
• Intel X25-M G2 160GB SSD

Obviously the rest of the components are far out of the leagues of these graphics cards but it should help us keep the gaming bottleneck on the GPUs.  Let’s go ahead and start out with some of these benchmarks:


One of the best received gaming titles on both console and PC for 2009, Batman: Arkham Asylum is an impressive game both visually and in terms of design.



Far Cry 2 is the spiritual sequel to one of the best selling and longest living games on the PC though this title was developed not by Crytek, but by Ubisoft directly using a completely new engine as well.  The game is set in Africa and you have malaria – what else do you need to know?


Batman: Arkham Asylum actually performs very well on the Radeon HD 5450 as it runs just a bit faster than the GeForce GT 220 and dominates over the GeForce 210.  In Far Cry 2 the HD 5450 falls more in line with our initial expectations: beating out the similarly priced GF 210 but falling behind the gaming power of the GT 220.