When it comes to low-end graphic card market, they always get last from the introduction of a new generation. Then again, graphic card manufacturers somehow are struggling to keep things in place in this low-end sector. You have AMD’s Radeon HD5450, which is considered one of the most perfect HTPC graphic cards out there. But then again Intel’s HD3000 embedded graphics is capable of going neck to neck at time. So how does AMD go and outperform their already great HD5450 in such a crowded market?

The Radeon HD6450 is codenamed Caicos, and is one of the last two Northern Island GPU families from AMD. It’s still using the same 40nm process TSMC, but with some of the improved features from the HD 6000 series cards. The numbers of processors are doubled from 80 to 160, and there’s now support for GDDR5. Of course, there’ll be two version of the card, a GDDR3 HD6450 and GDDR5 HD6450, to cut cost and have prices driven down.

For the GDDR5 6450 the core clock is 750MHz and the memory clock is 900MHz (3.6GHz data rate), making it 100MHz faster than the HD5450 and having over twice the memory bandwidth too.

With the new display controller comes a new set of output options for the 6450. The 6450 has gained both DisplayPort 1.2 and HDMI 1.4a compliance. The former is going to make it very easy to drive three digital displays from a 6450—cards almost universally come with a VGA port as the 3rd display otherwise. The latter is going to make it possible to drive 120Hz TVs at 120Hz for 3D content, primarily for Blu-ray 3D given the limited rendering capabilities of the 6450.

AMD has put the MSRP of the 6450 at $55. This will cover both the 512MB GDDR5 and 1GB DDR3 varieties. Pricing of low-end cards rarely toes the line, so expect prices to be all over the place in two weeks’ time.

Read the full review over at Anandtech