Introduction

I always make the effort to make sure every card that comes into my lab gets a review. It's the least I can do for a company that has made the effort to send it. So ATI managed to send off a HD 5450 in time for launch, but we thought that since we had a full retail model on hand as well, we would put that one up first.

What we would tend to do with the second card is do a Crossfire article. If you've read about the first HD 5450 we reviewed from Sapphire earlier today, you'll know that the performance on the HD 5450 in games is hardly flattering and realistically it's just not a model you would Crossfire.

We like to have reference temperatures and power figures on hand, though, and AMD did make the effort to send the card over so we thought why not CF these two budget cards, have a bit of fun and see if we can get something that's playable.

As always, the card didn't come with any package so we'll just get straight into having a look at the reference HD 5450.