As you can see from the following picture, Sapphire HD 5450 is a low profile card. The card is 16.8cm long and 7.2cm high (from PCI-E connector to the top of the passive cooler)



On the card you’ll find a single slot (we’ll call it that for now) passive cooler which stretches to the back of the card. Although the card is single slot on the front, the cooler is protruding in the back and might get in the way of hardware in the slot above.

Since the HD 5450 features a Cedar GPU that consumes only 19.1W, passive cooling is enough for this card. The card also features a 2-pin fan connector on the front of the card, just in case you need active air cooling



HD 5450 is inaudible and will be attractive to HTPC owners, but HTPC cases are often pretty compact and standard I/O panels are in turn often too high. Sapphire remedied that problem by including two low-profile I/O panels. The additional I/O panel, which features an opening for VGA out, is there so that you can mount it in one of the neighboring slots (ideally the one above the card, as the protruding part of the cooler wouldn’t have any components above it).



The I/O panel features dual-link DVI, VGA and DisplayPort outs, meaning the card is capable of ATI Eyefinity support of up to three monitors. If ATI Eyefinity is what you’re looking for, then you’ll have to purchase an HD 5450 card with DisplayPort connector, otherwise you’ll be limited to two monitor setups. Unfortunately, if you don’t have a DisplayPort monitor, you’ll have to purchase an active DisplayPort-to-DVI/VGA/HDMI that’s priced at around €100 (not to be confused with ordinary passive dongles which are cheap and often shipped with cards). Passive converters are much cheaper and will work well but in that case you can forget about Eyefinity.


Sapphire uses 512MB of DDR3 Samsung memory K4W1G1646E-HC12 running at 800Mhz. Two memory modules are on the face of the card and two on the back.