The Radeon HD 6450 is on its way

Following a discreet announcement at the beginning of February, now AMD has decided to launch the Radeon HD 6450 offically. It won’t however be available for a few weeks. What with availability for OEM clients and the retail availability planned for the end of the month, it’s difficult to say why AMD chose this particular launch date.

Whatever the reason, the specs haven’t changed from the OEM versions that we presented here in our news item on the subject. Basically, it’s a Radeon HD 5450 with doubled processing power and memory bandwidth that has potentially been doubled as well.

While this shouldn’t change things in terms of video game performance, which is insufficient, it should mean the Radeon HD 6450 is no longer limited in terms of video improvements. Add to this a more recent video engine, UVD3, which supports full MPEG2, DivX and 3D Blu-ray decoding and you have what looks like the ideal graphics card for an HTPC which isn’t for gaming.

Note however that the reference card supplied by AMD uses active cooling. Given that AMD has announced a range of clocks for the GPU, we imagine that the highest clocked version (750 MHz) needs active cooling while the version at the bottom of the range (625 MHz) can make do with fanless cooling, a much better solution for an HTPC. Having decided to focus this launch on performance in comparison to the GPUs integrated in the latest Intel CPUs, and not on the video aspect, the actively cooled version is what was sent to the press.

We will be publishing a test of the Radeon HD 6450 as well as the Radeon 6570 and 6670 which ought to be officially launched pretty soon.