Sapphire HD 5450 512MB Review

jlqrb - February 3, 2010
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Testing:

Even though the Sapphire HD 5450 is an entry-level graphics card and I don't expect it to achieve great FPS, I am still looking forward to seeing how it handles our testbed of games and benchmarks at the lower resolutions. For testing, I will be running the card though our series of gaming benchmarks, as well as programs such as 3DMark06 and 3DMark Vantage to gauge the overall gaming performance of the graphics card. I will also be comparing the graphics card to some of its mainstream contemporaries. As a budget level card, the HD 5450 will, for the most part, not be purchased to play games such as the ones I am about to run it though. Some games the card would perform well with would be WOW or the Sims, but those games aren't very graphics intensive and what fun would it be if we didn't push the card to the max? One note, though all of the comparison cards were originally tested on an Intel platform and have been retested on the AMD test platform so the numbers will vary from the comparison reviews. These cards were tested with the latest drivers from both Nvidia and ATI.

Processor: AMD Phenom II X4 955 @ 3.20GHz
Motherboard: ASUS M4A79T Deluxe AM3 motherboard
Memory: 4GB Kingston HyperX DDR3 1600 @ 9-9-9-27
Video Card : Sapphire Radeon ATI HD 5450 512MB
Power Supply: ZALMAN ZM750-HP 750W
Hard Drive: 1 x Seagate 7200.11 750GB SATA w/ 32MB Cache
Optical Drive: Lite-On 8x DVD+/-RW
OS: Windows Vista Ultimate Edition

Comparison Boards:

Overclocking:

When it came to overclocking, I used the AMD GPU Clock Tool and to my surprise I was able to overclock the HD 5450 quite high. I started out raising the core and memory in small increments, as I didn't expect much overclocking headroom from an entry-level card. After reaching 750MHz on the core and 1700MHz on the memory, I started raising the frequencies in larger amounts and in the end the HD 5450 was able to reach a final speed of 823MHz for the core and 1802MHz for the memory. This is pretty impressive for a passively cooled budget graphics card. As you can tell from the image, the HD 5450 is not yet fully supported by GPU-Z , so most information is not listed and some such as the bus width is just wrong.