POWERCOLOR Go! Green Radeon HD 5450 AX5450 256MD5-SH Video Card

Comment:
I haven't bought one of these yet, but I'm giving it a 5-star review. Why? Because Powercolor "got it", and they deserve praise and recognition for doing so. Here's reality:-high end cards don't need more than 1GB of RAM currently (except for the craziest of configurations, but they have cards for that already)-mid-range cards generally don't have the performance to render games smoothly higher than 1920x1200 with 4xAA, and thus 512MB is generally enough, especially if you are gaming at 1680x1050 instead.-low end cards have enough 3D horsepower for 1280x1024 or below, generally without AA. At those settings, 256MB of RAM is plenty.So, Powercolor did the smart, right thing by reducing the video RAM to practical levels, but using high performance GDDR5 instead. This maximizes the performance of the 5450 GPU. The list price is the same as the other Powercolor 5450 models, and if that were the end of the story, this would be my first pick hands down. The problem is the list price puts it only $10-$15 away from the 5550 cards, which is why I keep buying the other 5450 models (they're constantly on sale).If this goes on sale, or you get a good pricematch, this is the 5450 to get (assuming you don't need low profile).