ATI HD 5450 Video cards... any good?

[tvshowman]

Hi!

I had an 8600gt Video card in my pvr for the longest time and it was ok but the final straw on this card was when the fan started making noises which drove me bonkers one day and I opened the case and removed the heatsink and fan to clean the fan and broke the cheap plastic pin that holds the heatsink to the board.

Without the heatsink firmly in place the gpu will no doubt burn up so that was a huge mistake.

So as I threw the flipping video card on the ground in pure anger thinking I have no pvr until I get a new card I entered my motherboard model into google and realized my motherboard has on board video. (p5lmx)

No HDMI but it is directx 9.0. I loaded the drivers and started pvrx2 and was amazed at the picture quality of High Def Survivor. The picture was at 1450x1080 I believe and was for sure interlaced because I remember seeing the lins sometimes on pannings but the picture was soo sharp like I was in overlay mode or something...

anyway the audio would drift at times so I grabbed another computer that had an ati4200 pro card (correction... it was a 2400 pro) and put that in the pvr and man the picture sucked. You could see bad pixellation on the walls and faces and everything stationary had blotches of moving pixels... Annoying as hell.

After trying many different modes I ditched the card and went back to the GMA950 on board video since the quality was amazing even beating the 8600gt.

Well too my surprise now the gma950 was de-interlacing the pictures and the sharpness of the video is lost again and after days of trying every option and codec I could never recreate the non interlaced overlay picture quality.

I have been reading reviews on the HD5450 Video card I am seriously thinking of getting on for $54.99 cdn.

Reviews:
ATI Radeon HD 5450 & HD 5570 Graphics Cards

Radeon HD 5450 (Cedar) review: The ideal HTPC DirectX 11 graphics card?

Some reviews stated the card could not do some important de-interlacing however the problem was a driver issue that has since been corrected.

Does anyone here have the card or are thinking of getting one and have some opinions or what to get?

Does the card work nice with the HDPVR h.264 files?

Thanks for any input

[pBS]

i could only get a gma950 working decently with evr and ffdshow..
tho you might have better luck on win7 as intel's drivers for 7 are excellent..
but it seems they are abandoning XP work and solely working on win7 drivers, and newer motherboard igps...the other gma's are left out in the cold..[g45 works beautifully now tho]

the only thing i'd worry about with the 5450 is the drivers, the card has plenty of oomph to do all the video stuff, but if they don't get the deinterlacing right, or vertical sync working properly, then it won't matter, nothing will work or look good..
i was about to get one also but got my g45 working nicely and the HD3450 is still rock solid so i'm sticking with what i have..[plus i've got a 4650 handy if need be]
the 3000's are excellent now, the 4000's are still a bit shaky on drivers but they work and look good...haven't tried the 5000's yet but i don't think the shaders will be a problem..

but still i'd get an opinion from an actual owner first...they may or may not be ready for upgrading to, i've had to wait over a year for them to make working drivers more than once..[2 years seems to be sweet spot when everything works well, and they come out with another line of cards...lol]

[b00sfuk]

Got a HD5450 to replace onboard HD3200 and it is impressive. Cat 10.2 fix the interlacing problem with adaptive.

[siliconaudio]

I would only say that ATI drivers horribly inconsistent for any HTPC use. Every time I update I have a new problem which almost makes PVR use impossible. From 9.12 to 10.1 you could not properly set up over-scan resulting in black borders over HDMI. Now that it's fixed, I find that 10.2 won't remember settings like pull-down detection and noise reduction and edge correction.

nVidia drivers tend to be far more consistent and stable. I'm almost ready to ditch my new HD 4670 and install a comparative nVidia card. This is a real pity, because the hardware seems very capable.

[pBS]

cool, i have to say that lately things have gotten much better...with all makers and cards..
[at least for video playback]
seems they finally started paying attention to users wanting quality video playback instead of just catering to gamers and 3d users..

not to mention fulfilling their promises on the box and products that are only useful as 2d or video play cards finally live up to their billing..
[geez, don't bring to market something that's only distinguishing feature is 'made for htpc' if it can't playback even mpeg2 properly yet!]

they seem to have put alot of effort into the 780 chipsets *after* they came out to fix it's poor performance..i think even they gave up on improving it any more..i think it's just slightly underpowered and no driver mods will boost it anymore than it's current state..
not many changes for it lately..but it does run well now with occasional hiccups..
[very watchable, but not perfect]

[tvshowman]

Thanks everyone!

I'm going to get one shortly. I will post back my findings and let you know how it goes.

I can't really find any video cards with similar features and at that price point. If ATI can get the drivers together then I suspect they will grab the home theater market which will spark the others to release competitive video products and affordable prices.

this card looks really dam good on paper

Cheers

[whurlston]

I have the 5770 and love it. It's really overpowered for HTPC but the 5450 wasn't available at the time that I bought it. If I were to purchase one now, I would not hesitate on the 5450. I don't have the issues that siliconaudio mentioned and I'm running 10.2 as well.

[sgilani]

I always had deinterlacing problems on my HD 4670, but Catalyst 10.2 finally has made it all work smoothly. Both MPEG2 and H264 get full acceleration and adaptive deinterlace and proper pulldown removal.

btw, if you have some settings missing/grayed out in CCC, just download DXVAChecker and you should be able to enable all those settings.

[tvshowman]

Well I bought the " Powercolor Radeon HD 5450 650MHZ 512MB 1.3GHZ DDR3 HDMI DVI VGA DIRECTX11 PCI-E Video Card" $54.99

I could have bought the ATI 5570 for about $100 but couldn't justify the purchase since I bought an ATI 4770 last year for $120 for my main rig and that was to replace the slight;y slower 8800gt 1gig card I had which I paid $180. The 5570 is much slower than the 4770 and the 5450's price of $54.99 gave me enough to guy a 1.5tb hard drive.

I decided I would install Windows 7 demo on the new hard drive and start from scratch and see what happens and was bummed that my remote software would not work under windows 7 so that was a block for me right there. I need to access the pvr from my other computer so I can ctrl shift delete when something crashes lol...

anyway I tried to play some hdpvr files things looked choppy so I installed tme 3 and things looked choppy but could have been something with the maxvista software I had to use to control the box remotely. So I decided to install gbpvr and it looked like it was installing then it stopped and started to roll back and then it started to install and then it started to roll back like a yo-yo lol so after about 10 minutes of the "yo-yo-yinging" I turned the box off and booted into the old drive with XP and began to install drivers for the card and continue from there...

Everything installed fine and I loaded TME 03 and enabled hardware decoder and checked the info and it says hardware 1.0 .

With my nvidia I could never get a reading on hardware decoder no matter what I did and I discovered on another forum that the only way to get hardware H264 decoding on my 8600gt is to install purevision HD and I guess you have to buy that extra. After installing that I finally had hardware 1.0 in TME for that card but I dumped it a couple days later for the fan noise problem.

I gave away my 8800gt to my brother after I bought the 4770 and regret that as I could have sure used that one...

anyway I the 5450 running sweet on xp and gbpvr and have no problems to report. Some say the card is underpowered but I can tell you that for me and the settings I use it is running like a beast on all HDTV content and at 1920x1080 hdmi res to monitor.

In avivo video and select
Bright white
Dynamic Range
Vector Adaptive
Pulldown Detection
De-noise 64%
Edge Enhancement 100%
Enable dynamic contrast
Enforce smooth video playback

And the picture looks great and runs fine from the HDPVR .ts files

Vector Adaptive de-interlacing is something I never had before on my cards and it is simply awesome.

You can read a huge post about it here and what it does:
http://www.avsforum.com/avs-vb/showthread.php?t=1157287

I'm glad ATI released such a cheap video card for htpc's as the only other alternative is to buy a much more expensive gaming card.

[Yog-Sothoth]

A little late in this thread, but I can attest to the 5450's capability, at least for HTPC use. It works well for Blu-ray playback, and having bitstreamed Dolby TrueHD and DTS-HD on the card is an especially nice feature.