Published in Graphics

AMD introduces low end HD 6450

by on07 April 2011


Low profile, low price tag
AMD has introduced the cheapest and smallest 6-series graphics card to date. The HD 6450 is based on the Caicos GPU, with a die area of just 75mm square, 160 shaders and a 64-bit memory bus.

The card will show up in two flavours, with 1GB of DDR3 memory clocked up to 800MHz or 512MB of faster, 800 to 900MHz GDDR5. In addition, the GPU also ends up at different clocks, as it runs at 625MHz on DDR3 cards and 750MHz on the GDDR5 variant. Frankly, AMD could have just as easily announced two SKUs with different clocks and memory.

The HD 6450 is not designed to turn heads and it is about as unimpressive as Nvidia’s new GT 520. On the upside, the HD 6450 is a low-profile card with power consumption rated at just 27W in the GDDR5 variant and 20W in the DDR3 card. Idle power consumption is a mere 9W. With an expected sub-$50 price tag, it’s a pretty good card for the money, especially if you factor in the low power consumption and the format factor, which makes it suitable for SFF or HTPC rigs.

On another note, as you may have noticed, neither AMD nor Nvidia have anything exciting in the works for the next few months. The industry is still stuck at 40nm and frankly both NV’s and AMD’s current generations are rather underwhelming. Also, it might be interesting to see how current entry-level discrete cards will compare to Llano graphics, as it appears that such discrete cards are a dying breed.

You can check out the details here.



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