14 DAY TRIAL // NVIDIA has already covered the high-end market and will soon unleash the GeForce GTX 460, which should take care of the mainstream to some extent. This means that, quite soon, the entry-level market will be the only segment exclusively covered by Advanced Micro Devices, at least as far as DirectX 11 graphics are concerned. Knowing this, Club 3D has apparently decided to make the best of this little monopoly by offering a somewhat unusual low profile version of the ATI Radeon HD 5450.
For all intents and purposes, the new Club 3D HD 5450 is, more or less, identical to the reference model, with one very important difference. Said difference lies in the fact that, in order to enhance the so-called multimedia experience, the board was given support for the Eyefinity technology. As some may know, Eyefinity is a feature that some of the mid-to-high end HD 5000 Series employ in order to spread the viewing area, during gaming or watching videos, to three monitors. The company decided it was time for the entry-level market to benefit from it as well.
Obviously, since the card itself is weak compared to most others in its line, it isn't exactly meant for gaming, nor could it even perform acceptably if forced to run them. This is because it has the 40nm Cedar GPU clocked at 650 MHz and only 512MB of DDR2 VRAM clocked at 800 MHz. The feature set also includes a 64-bit memory interface and 80 stream processors, besides the obligatory D-Sub, DVI and DisplayPort outputs.
It should probably be noted that, in addition to ATI Eyefinity, the video controller supports the ATI Avivo HD, ATI PowerPlay, ATI Sterama and even ATI CrossFireX technologies. A final asset of the HD 5450 Eyefinity 3 Edition is its passive cooling solution, which makes it dead silent and, thus, an excellent HTPC component. Unfortunately, the final price tag has not been revealed.