Sapphire Radeon HD 5450 512MB DDR3 Review

Heat & Acoustics

For all temperature testing, the cards were placed on an open test bench with a single 120mm 1200RPM fan placed ~8” away from the heatsink. The ambient temperature was kept at a constant 22°C (+/- 0.5°C). If the ambient temperatures rose above 23°C at any time throughout the test, all benchmarking was stopped. For this test we use the 3DMark Batch Size test at it highest triangle count with 0xAA and 0xAF and looped it for one hour to determine the peak load temperature as measured by GPU-Z.

For Idle tests, we let the system idle at the Windows 7 desktop for 15 minutes and recorded the peak temperature.


When it comes to acoustics, obviously this card is the quietest of the bunch due to its passive heatsink. This heatsink also acts like a double edged sword since it also contributes to the HD 5450 showing some of the highest temperatures of the bunch. However, we are sure that in a well-ventilated case, there won’t be any need for concern.

Power Consumption

For this test we hooked up our power supply to a UPM power meter that will log the power consumption of the whole system twice every second. In order to stress the GPU as much as possible we once again use the Batch Render test in 3DMark06 and let it run for 30 minutes to determine the peak power consumption while letting the card sit at a stable Windows desktop for 30 minutes to determine the peak idle power consumption. We have also included several other tests as well. Please note that after extensive testing, we have found that simply plugging in a power meter to a wall outlet or UPS will NOT give you accurate power consumption numbers due to slight changes in the input voltage. Thus we use a Tripp-Lite 1800W line conditioner between the 120V outlet and the power meter.


Honestly, what can we say about the power consumption of this card? It is just phenomenal considering the performance difference between it and the NVIDIA GT 210. Make no mistake about it, the GT 210 is a very efficient card but it goes without mentioning that ATI’s 40nm manufacturing process