ATI Launches $50 DirectX 11 Cards With Passive Cooling

From DailyTech: ATI is launching the Radeon HD 5450 for those people. The card uses ATI's newest 40nm chip from TSMC, codenamed Cedar. The GPU is a mere 59mm2, enabling the Radeon 5450 to become the first DirectX 11 video card to sell for under $50. It will use DDR3 or DDR2, depending on the Add-In Board partner who sells the card. 512MB versions will sell for around $50, while 1GB versions will sell for around $60.

The new card also targets another important market. The Home Theatre PC segment is growing, and users there generally desire a passive cooling solution. The Radeon 5450 has a Thermal Design Power of only 19.1W, and an idle power usage of 6.4 watts. This enables the use of a passive cooling solution. The reference card shown uses a heatsink that occupies two slots, but AIBs will mostly be selling single slot solutions.

The Radeon 5450 has very similar specifications to the Radeon HD 4550, but adds support for ATI's Eyefinity multi-monitor support. 24 inch monitors are now available around the $200 mark, and smaller screen sizes can be had for even less. Other features of note to HTPC enthusiasts are 8-channel LPCM audio and bitstreaming audio support.

The graphics division of AMD has a launched complete top to bottom discrete DirectX 11 product line, while NVIDIA hasn't launched a single DX11 card yet. Cypress, Juniper, Redwood, and Cedar will form the backbone of ATI's discrete sales for the next six months, and any new products will be based around those chips and their respins.

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