ATI Mobility Radeon HD 5650

The for AMD ATI Mobility Radeon HD 5650 is a middle class DirectX 11 graphics card for laptops. Its based on the Madison (LE, LP or Pro) chip and is produced in40nm. Like its predecessor, the Mobility Radeon 4650, the HD 5650 features a 128 Bit memory bus for dedicated DDR3 and GDDR3 memory chips. GDDR5 is  not supported on the HD 5650 (only in the higher clocked versions like the 5750 or 5770cards based on the same chip).

In our benchmarks with the HD 5650, the GPU is performing on a level with the previous Mobility Radeon HD 4670 or the Nvidia GeForce GTS 250M (with DDR3 graphics memory). This means the performance is sufficient for high details in nearly all DirectX 10 games (only Crysis and GTA4 are not fluently playable in high details - see gaming list below). Upcoming and current DirectX 11 games (like DIRT2) may not run in full detail settings. That means some of the new DirectX 11 features (Tesselation e.g.) may not run fluently on this gaming graphics adapter. Currently the HD 5650 is a good gaming pick for well priced laptops with a 15 inch screen and a resolution of about 1366x768.

The Mobility HD 5650 supports Avivo HD to accelerate HD videos using the graphics card. The improved UVD2 processor in the DirectX11 models of the Radeon HD 5000 series is able to decode up to two streams in parallel (if the card offers enough memory bandwidth). It is not clear if the HD 5650 using (G)DDR3 offers enough bandwidth for this task. 

Another novelty of the HD 5650 is the possibility to transport HD Audio formats (8-channel Dolby True HD, DTS Master) over the HDMI port.

Thanks to Eyevision, up to 6 monitors can be used with the HD 5650 in 3D and 2D applications (if the laptop features DisplayPort outputs). In most laptops this is not the case, and therefore only 2 monitors are supported at a time.

The power consumption should be (due to the modern 40nm process in 2009) relatively low and according to rumors about 10-15 Watt.

Compared to desktop graphics cards, the Mobilty 5650 is similar to a ATI Radeon 5570 with lower core clock speeds and slower memory speeds (the desktop 5570 is similar to the Mobility 5770).