Power Consumption & Temperatures
While the Radeon HD 5450 may not have been very impressive when measuring gaming performance, the power consumption figures are quite good. Under load the Radeon HD 5450 used 10% less power than the GeForce GT 220, though it's worth pointing out that more often than not the performance gap between these two cards was wider than 10% in the GeForce's favor. The same could be said about the Radeon HD 4650, which was considerably faster for gaming.
The heatsink and fan cooling setup used on our review sample was on the cheap side, even for a budget graphics card, so we hope that AMD partners can come up with far more impressive solutions. Despite the low power consumption levels of the Radeon HD 5450, our board still ran rather hot, almost reaching 60 degrees under load. This made the Radeon HD 5450 hotter than the Radeon HD 4650 and GeForce GT 240 graphics cards, both of which carried upgraded coolers.