The Final Word on the Best Radeon HTPC Card

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The Final Word on the Best Radeon HTPC Card
   

  Since we published our reviews of the Radeon HD 5450 and the Radeon HD 5570, we have been going back and forth with AMD over the results of our video quality tests using the Cheese Slices test. Our initial results showed that neither the 5570 nor the 5450 had enough compute power to handle the full suite of post-processing abilities on 1080i video, the most...
   

http://www.anandtech.com/weblog/showpost.aspx?i=669
    

[Matt John]

Glad to see the quick clarification article Ryan.  I still beg to differ on the conclusion however.  The 5570 adds a small (noisy!) fan, cost, and minimal extra in terms of features over the 5450 for all realistic output resolutions (up to 1080p). 

So the 5450 can't add denoise and edge enhancement to a 1080i signal?  Who cares.  The few times I need to deinterlace 1080i is on a CBS broadcast and the last thing I'd do is add edge enhancement artifacts nor does it need much if any denoise.  Blu-ray doesn't need deinterlacing (1080p24).  The 5450 will handle DVD 480i just fine for vector adaptive plus all the extra post-processing you want for such a small source resolution.

The 5570 or 5670 are still pretty useless as gaming cards, so I'd say hands down it's a fanless low-profile 5450 for purely HTPC.  5850 if you want to game, have full card space, and add a larger/quiet fan.