Board analysis

We’re not going to spend a ton of time discussing the Radeon 5450’s board design, as ATI’s allowing their board partners to come up with their own unique designs for this GPU, instead this could be a preview of what’s to come with final retail cards.

As you can see, the 5450 reference board is a low-profile design with passive cooling – no fan is needed to keep the GPU cool.


The heatsink ATI employs is a dual-slot unit, so you have to keep the expansion slot directly adjacent to your PCI Express Graphics slot empty in order for the 5450 reference board to fit. We don’t think many of ATI’s board partners will utilize a dual-slot cooler on their final boards though; in order to ensure that the 5450 is compatible with as wide a variety of system cases as possible, they’ll probably want to stick with a shorter single-slot cooler.


Moving around to the back of the card, ATI equips the 5450 reference board with one VGA, one DisplayPort, and one DVI output. Again, don’t get too hung up on the video outputs you see here, as ATI’s board partners will be offering a variety of options for end users. You may see some card makers ditch the VGA output on the reference board for an HDMI output for instance. Also remember that you’ll need a 5450 card with at least one DisplayPort output in order to run Eyefinity across three displays.

Interestingly enough, our 5450 reference board actually shipped with Samsung memory modules running at 900MHz, 100MHz higher than ATI’s specifications. ATI says that their board partners are free to OC the memory on their 5450 boards up to 900MHz, so it’s possible that some partners may clock their boards that high. We made sure to clock the memory on our board down to 800MHz for testing purposes.


Physically the reference board is just over 6.5” in length, and while it lacks dedicated CrossFire connectors, CrossFire support will be provided via software. When we asked if the chip would support Hybrid CrossFire with ATI’s upcoming 800-series IGP we were told to “stay tuned”, so we’re hopeful that AMD will continue to offer this interesting feature.

ATI says Radeon 5450 board prices will range anywhere from $49-$59, with board prices varying depending on memory type, size, and clock speeds.