Battle of the Radeons

In the search for a suitable Radeon HD card for my new AmigaONE 500 I hunted for some of the recommended cards on eBay and found there were many to choose from. However, I soon discovered many Radeon HD cards are double height and although these might work they are not practical in the AmigaONE 500 as below the PCIe slot is the motherboard's one PCI slot occupied by a SATA board. Despite this I found a good selection of single height cards and ended up the winning bidder on two cards:

Sapphire ATI Radeon HD 5450 1 GB

XFX ATI Radeon HD 5550 1GB

Both arrived neatly packaged and in good condition. I set about installing the XFX card first, the more expensive of the two, which has a smart black PCB with red DVI making it a nice match with the rest of the components in the AmigaONE. The card slotted in to the PCIe slot nicely with just enough space between the card's fan and the back of the SATA card to allow for air flow.

I had already downloaded the RadeonHD driver from the A-EON website so plugged in and booted up the system, the card was recognised straight away and Workbench loaded on a 1980x1080 screen. I was impressed with how easy the install was, the driver was a doddle to install and the card appears to need no configuration and just works, brilliant! The only noticeable downside of the XFX card was the noise coming from the onboard fan, so out of curiosity I decided to try out the fanless Sapphire card.

The Sapphire card is a low profile card although still features the same DVI, HDMI and VGA connectors as the XFX. Being low profile it comes with optional low profile PCI back plates for slim tower cases. Switching off the system and taking out the XFX card I couldn't help noticing how warm the first card had got and the surrounding case after running for half an hour or so. Given the low profile and fanless design of the Sapphire I suspected this card would be less power hungry and cooler (always a plus). As with the fist card this one also ran flawlessly with AmigaOS unfazed by the change over.

I tested both cards with the GfxBench2D graphics benchmarking tool and found the XFX card came out with a slightly higher overall score although I can't say as I can tell the difference using the machine. Clicking the links above will take you to the respective results pages.

Apart from the benchmarking I also played the recently release MACE with both cards. This was not a very scientific test this as I found it tricky to keep an eye on the FPS counter while playing, but on the XFX seemed to manage between 70-90 FPS, while the Sapphire was more like 60-80 FPS. So the XFX wins on the MACE front, although didn't help my high score much!

So the XFX wins the benchmark race, but the Sapphire seems to run cooler and silently. Which should I go for?