HIS Radeon HD 5450 Silence PCIe 1x/16x Review

1. Introduction2. HIS Radeon HD 5450 Silence3. Media Encoding with Cyberlink Media Espresso4. Media Playback with Cyberlink PowerDVD 105. Flash HD Playback6. Gaming Performance7. Thermal Dynamics8. Power Consumption9. Overclocking10. Closing Thoughts11. View All Pages

The AMD HD5450 has proven to be a popular card with the enthusiast HTPC audience, due to the low pricing and media acceleration capabilities. This particular series has also been adopted by the business audience who value a low cost strategy with support for multiple monitors.

The HIS HD5450 Silence card that we are reviewing today is slightly different than the mainstream HD5450 model as it also offers an upgrade option for the audience who only have a PCIe 1x slot motherboard. With support for both PCIe 1x/16x slots it will be compatible with a huge cross section of systems.

HIS are targeting machines such as the E310, Optiplex 745, Optiplex GX520, PowerEdge SC1430, SFF desktop dc series, Dimension 3100 and PowerEdge Server T110.

Specifications:

• Core Clock: 650MHz
• Memory: 1024MB GDDR3
• Memory Clock: 1000MHz (Effective)
• Processing Cores: 80
• Bus Type: PCI-Express 2.1
• Display Connectors: 1 VGA, 1 Dual-Link DVI-I & 1 HDMI
• HDCP Capable
• DirectX 11 Support
• OpenGL 3.2 Support
• ATI Eyefinity Technology
• ATI Avivo HD
• ATI Stream Technology
• Low profile brackets supplied

The HIS HD5450 arrives in a very familar box featuring the HIS sword on a white background. Information is listed on the front detailing system support for server systems and other platforms.

Inside there are low profile brackets, literature on the product, a DVI to HDMI video converter and software disc. The card is shipped inside thick protective padding.

The HD 5450 is a tiny board, which is passively cooled via a black, branded heatsink. As this product supports PCI 1x slots, the size of the connector is substantially smaller.

The card comes with three connectors, 1 VGA, 1 Dual Link DVI-I and a displayport. The VGA connector can be removed to save even more space inside a chassis. AMD Eyefinity is fully supported.

The heatsink is a plain black design and HIS have ensured that it doesn't overstep the size of the PCB underneath. There is a power connector for a fan, although HIS are passively cooling this product.

An overview of the specifications that we discussed earlier. 650mhz on the core, with 1GB GDDR3 memory running at 500/1000mhz via a 64 bit memory bus.

To test today we are using a Core i5 760 processor with 8GB of GSKILL memory running at 1333mhz. System validiation is available over here. It is worth mentioning that this graphics solution will often be running within a much less powerful system, however for the game testing later we wanted to ensure that the maximum performance figures were documented.

CyberLink MediaEspresso 6 is the successor to CyberLink MediaShow Espresso 5.5. With its further optimized CPU/GPU-acceleration, MediaEspresso is an even faster way to convert not only your video but also your music and image files between a wide range of popular formats.

Now you can easily playback and display your favorite movies, songs and photos not just on your on your mobile phone, iPad, PSP, Xbox, or Youtube and Facebook channels but also on the newly launched iPhone 4.

Compile, convert and enjoy images and songs on any of your computing devices and enhance your videos with CyberLink’s built-in TrueTheater Technology.

New and Improved Features

• Ultra Fast Media Conversion – With support from the Intel Core i-Series processor family, ATI Stream & NVIDIA CUDA, MediaEspresso’s Batch-Conversion function enables multiple files to be transcoded simultaneously.
• Smart Detect Technology – MediaEspresso 6 automatically detects the type of portable device connected to the PC and selects the best multimedia profile to begin the conversion without the need for user’s intervention.
• Direct Sync to Portable Devices – Video, audio and image files can be transferred in a few easy steps to mobile phones including those from Acer, BlackBerry, HTC, Samsung, LG, Nokia, Motorola, Sony Ericsson, and Palm, as well as Sony Walkman and PSP devices.
• Enhanced Video Quality – CyberLink TrueTheater Denoise and Lighting enables the enhancement of video quality through optical noise filters and automatic brightness adjustment.
• Video, Music and Image File Conversion – Convert not only videos to popular formats such as AVI, MPEG, MKV, H.264/AVC, and FLV at the click of a button, but also images such as JPEG and PNG and music files like WMA, MP3 and M4A.
• Online Sharing – Conversion to video formats used by popular social networking websites and a direct upload feature means posting videos to Facebook and YouTube has never been easier.

For our testing today we are converting a 3.28GB 720p MKV file to Apple Mp4 format for playback on a portable device. This is a common procedure for many people and will give a good indication of system power.

Even with the software update, the HIS HD5450 can't use full acceleration to help with encoding, but the system returned a final time of 16 minutes and 6 seconds.

Our good friends at Cyberlink kindly supplied the software for our Bluray and conversion tests.

Cyberlink PowerDVD 10 is one of the finest solutions for the Blu-Ray experience on Windows and we found this software to work perfectly with this chipset. We tested with the Bluray Disc of Avatar, one of our favourite sci-fi films in recent years. We are using an Asus External BluRay drive for these tests.

The HIS HD5450 offers ATI Avivo video acceleration which will help reduce CPU load when viewing media files.

First we are testing with a 1080p WMV file.

With Avivo acceleration enabled, average CPU use drops from 21 percent, down to 6 percent, which is a considerable saving. These gains would be even more noticeable with an older, slower processor.

Again, noticeable gains are evident with ATI's hardware acceleration enabled. This will not only help to lower CPU temperatures, but enhance the multitasking experience allowing you to achieve more in the background, while watching high definition media.

Many people using this system will be enjoying Flash related content so we feel it is important to test with some of the more demanding material available freely online.

Again when running with the latest Flash code, we see marked gains when enabling the hardware acceleration of the graphics solution, reducing CPU utilisation by 9 percent.

It is true that the HD5450 will not be incorporated within a gaming system, however many people may want to casually play a game now and again, even in the confines of a media center.

Firstly, we tested with Call Of Duty: Modern Warfare 2, on low settings with V-Sync disabled and the resolution set to 720p – we enabled high texture quality however as the game looks awful without this. We tested real world gaming over a 5 minute period and averaged the results via the FRAPs Professional logs. 2x anti aliasing was enabled.

The game was smooth as butter, and we would tweak a few more settings to increase the image quality a little further. That said, we were quite impressed to see this game playable at 720p, especially with Anti Aliasing enabled.

Serious Sam HD is a popular title with our readers and we felt it was worth an inclusion today. We set the options to ‘low' at a resolution of 720p (1280×720). We played the game for 5 minutes through the Egyptian level and averaged the results via the FRAPs Professional logs.

The game was again, very smooth and enjoyable to play and it shows that at modest settings, these are perfectly acceptable for casual gaming environments.

The tests were performed in a controlled air conditioned room with temperatures maintained at a constant 25c – a comfortable environment for the majority of people reading this.

Idle temperatures were measured after sitting at the desktop for 30 minutes. Load measurements were acquired by loading Furmark  and measuring the peak temperature.

The card runs very cool and generally when gaming it hovers around 49c. Furmark pushes the hardware further, and we recorded a maximum of 54c which is still a great result. This hardware is clearly designed to run in less than ideal environmental conditions, such as inside a confined, hot running server chassis.

To test power consumption today we are using a Keithley Integra unit and we measure power consumption from the VGA card inputs, not the system wide drain. The best way to get maximum load results is by using Furmark, and even though it is not indicative of a real world situation it shows the limits the card can theoretically demand. The ‘gaming’ results are measured when playing Crysis Warhead and is a more valuable result to take from this.

An incredible set of results, with the card taking 13 watts under Furmark load, this is actually less than many performance cards require at idle!

Very few of these cards will be used in an overclocked state, however as a matter of curiosity we decided to see how far we could push the hardware with software overclocking.

A very good core overclock of around 18 percent and the memory was able to hit 1100mhz before artifacting would occur.

In the overclocked state, card temperatures rose by several degrees celcius, both at idle and when under full load.

This HIS HD 5450 is a solid entry level product, ideal for home media and server systems. The fact that they have given it PCIe 1x compatibility means that it will reach a much wider audience. Server systems with older motherboards will find a good home for this specific solution as it offers excellent video acceleration and multi screen support, without costing a fortune.

Unfortunately for the mainstream enthusiast audience, this backwards compatible version of the HD5450 will prove rather expensive. The regular HIS HD5450 GDDR3 graphics card costs £42 inc vat and this model today will be retailing in excess of £90 including VAT. HIS have explained that the development and the production of this card is much higher than the mainstream unit however this means that it makes little sense for the majority of people reading this review. Unless you specifically require PCIe 1x slot support then it makes more financial sense to purchase the mainstream version of the card.

Other aspects deserve credit. The passive cooler is excellent and in reasonably good environments, the core will never exceed 50c. Equally important, the card generates no noise and we didn't notice any coil noise either from the PCB which is reassuring.

Those people in the market for a low powered card with video acceleration capabilities would be advised to shortlist the HIS HD5450 as it consumes a measerly 13 watts under full load, and generally under 9 watts when watching high definition video. It will hardly cost anything to run over the course of a year, opening the market to the ‘green' audience wanting to lower their environmental footprint (and electricity bill!).

KitGuru says: The HIS HD5450 Silence is a great card and this version is specifically targeting an audience with only PCIe 1x slot support. The vanilla version at half the price will be a more sensible option for a semi modern media center, but we appreciate HIS are helping to support people with legacy systems.

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