AMD Radeon 6450 512MB Graphics Card Review

Final ThoughtsThe 6450 is a hit and miss kind of card and from our tests you are probably assuming that it’s more miss than hit and from your tests you’d be exactly right. We test all of our cards at some of the most extreme settings which allows for an easy comparison, but with cards like this it may seem that they have no place in the market whatsoever but you’d be wrong. If you look at our benchmarks again you’ll see that we run all of our tests at 1920×1080 or using the best performance/extreme pre-sets which gives you scope for lowering the AA/AF quality settings and the resolution to give a comfortable frame rate whilst still benefiting from some eye candy.

More so our tests show the true potential of using this card in a HTPC scenario. It clearly shows that the card is capable of running high quality at large resolutions meaning that it shouldn’t have any problems with HD content and with AMD bringing out new versions of their Catalyst software with HD stabilisation, you won’t be dissapointed in that area.

As I sit here typing this I can still hear the faint whisper of the fan but we are using it on a test bench so that’s not completely fair to say that the card is “loud” but more “a bit noisier than first expected”. Though we can assure you that once in a case it should be fine and dandy, but it may be picked up on if you are going for the silent HTPC route. The simple solution for that is to remove the fan and run the card passively which we believe is doable based on our temperature tests.

Overall, the 6450 isn’t something we’d recommend to the world but would advise you to possibly save a bit more money and go for the 6570 instead, but once you’re looking at the extra £15 for that, you may as well pay another £15 and get a 6670, and whilst you’re at it you’ll probably end up with a 6990 after paying all of these extra £15’s. It’s a hit and miss as said, but if you manage to get one come up cheap you won’t be dissappointed as long as you’re not expecting to play Metro 2033 on the highest quality settings because it just clearly isn’t going to happen but if you are in the market for a HTPC based card and fancy a bit of “light” gaming then this may be right up your street.

Pros:

• Fairly cheap
• Has the ability to be low-profile
• Variety of connections
• Can handle HD content

Cons:

• Fan can be noisy
• Not for gamers
• £15 more gets you a card with over double the performance

We would like to thank AMD for supplying this sample
You can purchase this item from Eclipse Computers