Sapphire Radeon HD 5450 512MB DDR3 Review

A Closer Look at the Sapphire HD 5450 512MB

The Sapphire HD 5450 512MB looks literally like a clone of past low-end ATI cards but there is more to it than what first meets the eye. It is a compact card that is perfectly designed for use in SFF cases or even in some of the thinner tower enclosures that we have been seeing from various manufacturers. The only somewhat interesting thing about Sapphire’s version is that they used a custom blue PCB instead of the reference black.

You will also notice the lack of the usual Crossfire bridge. This is because the HD 5450 supports software (bridgeless) Crossfire on supporting motherboards.


Considering the low heat output of the HD 5450’s 40nm core, there really isn’t any need to outfit it with a high-end heatsink design. Sapphire opted for a simple single slot affair that uses black-painted aluminum fins and your case’s airflow to cool things off.


The back of the card holds two 128MB DDR3 memory ICs and not much else other than a slight wrap-around for the heatsink which slightly increases its size and cooling potential.


Unfortunately, as we saw in the Specifications section Sapphire has an SKU that lacks a HDMI out but has support for Eyefinity and this just happens to be that card. This really is too bad but if you want Eyefinity on a budget (without any hope of gaming on three displays) for content creation or something along those lines, it may be just the card you are looking for. All we have here are connectors for VGA, DVI and DisplayPort.



At 6 3/4” in length, the HD 5450 is extremely compact but also the minimum size a PCI-E graphics card can get. It basically has the same length and girth as the GT 210 but it slightly wider than the much higher-specified HD 5670 which makes it ideal for certain scenarios.