Sapphire has launched a few entry level graphics cards with DirectX 11 support today, and our today’s guest, Radeon HD 5450, is a low-profile, passively cooled single slot graphics card. Maximum consumption stands as low as 20W, so no need for external connectors and the card features 512MB of DDR3 memory on a 64-bit memory interface. The GPU runs at 650MHz whereas the memory is at 800MHz (1600MHz effectively).
The card’s I/O panel features Dual-Link DVI, VGA and DisplayPort outs, which means that the card will support up to three monitors, courtesy of ATI Eyefinity technology.
Sapphire announced a few other models based on the 40nm Cedar GPU. Two of those come with a combination of DisplayPort, Dual-Link and VGA whereas the rest feature Dual-Link DVI, VGA and HDMI. As far as memory configurations go, you can choose between 512MB DDR3 or 1GB DDR2 versions.
Radeon HD 5450 has 80 stream processors at its disposal and thanks to ATI Stream technology, the card can reproduce HD video as well as share some load between the CPU and GPU in apps that support stream technology. This is the cheapest DirectX 11 card so don’t expect miracles, but as you can see from our preliminary results, gaming is possible. The card is priced at around €50 and you can find it here.
