Old AMD R5 230 2gb vs Radeon hd 6450 2gb

[gizmo1990]

I'm looking for an old passive Radeon card to use in a mame arcade cabinet. The 2 cards in the title appear to be the only passively cooled cards available currently.

Would I be right in thinking that the 6450 is a better overall card? Even though it's much older? From my research so far it appears to be because of faster memory. But is this the only reason? I'd immediately presumed that the newer card would be better, but this doesn't appear to be the case.

Thought I'd ask here, as I know nothing about AMD cards! Any advice greatly appreciated.

 

[Armageus]

Should be no real difference between a 6450 and a R5 230 - to all intents and purposes they are the same GPU (Terascale 2 architecture with the same core config 160/8/4).

They should both be using the same type of Memory (DDR3). There are a few "official" specs for the memory 533/800/900Mhz DDR (1066/1600/1800 Mhz effective), but manufacturers seemingly have fairly free reign e.g. Sapphire offer 1334Mhz (effective) cards for both 6450/R5 230
http://www.sapphiretech.com/productdetial.asp?pid=F4B8E61A-889F-4A50-94F7-CA9F5AE1CC26&lang=eng
http://www.sapphiretech.com/productdetial.asp?Pid=0DB2B166-9191-4362-96FD-037A1F267ADC&lang=eng

Realistically memory speed will make very little difference to these cards, so I would just get whatever is cheapest.

Is there any particular reason you are looking at a Radeon and/or a Passively cooled card? If an NVIDIA card is acceptable it's worth looking at either of these:

My basket at Overclockers UK:

• 1 x Palit GeForce GT 710 SILENT 2048MB GDDR3 PCI-Express Graphics Card= £29.99
• 1 x MSI GeForce GT 1030 2GH OC Passive 2048MB GDDR5 PCI-Express Graphics Card= £79.99

Total: £119.88 (includes shipping: £9.90)​

​

GT710 will be marginally quicker than a 6450/R5 230, but the 1030 would be hugely quicker

 

[gizmo1990]

Thanks for that @Armageus Yep, those Sapphires are the ones I've been looking at, I completely didn't see those ram speed settings though! The websites I'd looked at must have been quoting other variants which had speed differences.

I would normally prefer to go with Nvidia but apparently Radeons' are more trouble free when it comes to the world of arcade emulation and crt displays. Hmm, perhaps I'll go the R5 230 route then since it's a more modern design.

 

[4K8KW10]

Thanks for that @Armageus Yep, those Sapphires are the ones I've been looking at, I completely didn't see those ram speed settings though! The websites I'd looked at must have been quoting other variants which had speed differences.

I would normally prefer to go with Nvidia but apparently Radeons' are more trouble free when it comes to the world of arcade emulation and crt displays. Hmm, perhaps I'll go the R5 230 route then since it's a more modern design.

You can find an XFX RX 460 Heatsink Edition: http://www.xfxforce.com/en-us/products/amd-radeon-rx-400-series/rx-460-4gb-heatsink-rx-460p4hfg5-