Standing pretty much toe to toe with the GT 610 is the Asus HD 5450. This is another extremely low cost 2GB card, costing in the region of £36, and as before, it has one or two drawbacks that need to be considered.
The Radeon HD 5450 range of cards were released way back in 2010, making them at least two years older than the GT 610s, which in computing terms is an absolute age. It uses the Cedar Pro variant of the Cedar GPU, with a core clock speed of 650MHz and memory clock of 450MHz. There are 80 shading units, eight texture mapping units, a TDP of 19W, DVI, VGA and HDMI outputs.
Again, it's a low-profile, PCI-e 2.0 single-slot card with passive cooling in the form of a stylish looking heatsink spread across the tiny Cedar processor and memory. The lack of a fan makes this card a little quieter than the GT 610 but only slightly.
The maximum theoretical display is 2560 x 1600, which certainly sounds tantalising. Running anything at those resolutions on this card, other than looking at your desktop, is going to be a bit of a chore for the poor thing, though.
The poor 3DMark GPU score of just 330 means that you'll be lucky to be able to run any of the games released within the last decade. With standard desktop duties, though, it does perform slightly better. Very basic photo manipulation is acceptable and, to a point, some video editing. Once you get into more graphical heavy work, though, the HD 5450 begins to noticeably struggle under the load.
We also found HD content struggled somewhat too. There were brief moments of pixelisation and screen tearing as well as some Flash problems on YouTube. In all honesty, we were convinced at one point that we were using the older 512MB version of the card instead of the more meaty 2GB variety.
Indeed, the Asus HD 5450 is a low-cost, card and its low-profile, silent running would certainly appeal to the casual buyer. In practice, though, the HD 5450 is a pretty poor performer. For a few pounds less you could have the far more capable GT 610, which is roughly the same size and only a tad noisier due to the fan -and that could probably be circumvented with a little creative thinking.
So although the Asus HD 5450 may look to be the equal of the GT 610, it's not. Where the engineering processes went wrong, we're not sure, but this card doesn't deliver anywhere near as good performance as the previous card of equal standing. If it's more performance you're after, then you'll have to spend a little more, otherwise save a couple of pounds and opt for the GT 610.