Sapphire Radeon HD 5450 - 1 GB DDR2 HDMI/DVI-I/VGA PCI-Express Graphics Card 100292L

I'm not one for long reviews.

My computer runs Windows 7 64bit. I use media center for all my DVR needs, and I output to an HD front projector in my home theater room.

This card replaced my GeForce 7600, which was very old but still ran pretty well. The main reason I bought the Sapphire 5450 was because AMD/ATi finally put out a nice card that would pass HD audio through HDMI to the source. I was using optical SP/DIF before. The card does everything I am used to at good speeds. It's not much good for gaming, but I'm not a gamer so I don't care.

Great price for a great HTPC card. I recommend it.

I couldn't pass up a killer deal a local retailer had for an H55 motherboard and i3 530(over half off msrp) so I embarked on building a little HTPC. 4 gig of ram, 3 2TB WD Greens, 2 optical drives(one blu-ray, one dvd as to not wear out the blu-ray when not in use), and a partridge in a pear tree. Anyhow the onboard video on the I3 was ok. Not stellar, but decent. It could play blu-ray but once in a while I'd see a strange artifact or a dropped frame, just enough to annoy me. Hulu was terrible even with the flash 10.1 drivers in Win7, the GPU offloading didn't help when the GPU was so weak.

Sooooo, I picked up this little gem. It has fulfilled everything I expected, silent, cool, and capable. Any video format plays flawlessly, from Blu-ray, MKV, xvid, anything. Hulu runs great, silverlight(netflix) is superb, and I even get about 45fps in WoW at 1080p with the settings on medium. Stock it got a 3.8 WEI in Win7, overclocked it gets a 4.2. A great part of this thing...Read more

I purchased the Sapphire Radeon HD 5450 to getter better a better full screen video experience than what my HP Pavilion Slimline on board video was able to do. The card comes with full and half size panels to accommodate full and slimline cases.

The ati software was easy to install, and upgrading to the latest from the web was simple as well. The catalyst software provides all sorts of options for video, 3d effects, over-clocking, and desktop settings. That said, I'm not a fan. Catalyst refused to offer the higher refresh rates my monitor was capable of until I found an obscure tip on the web which was to boot the computer with the monitor off. Turning the monitor after Win 7 revealed some enabled some of the higher refresh rates. Not intuitive and nothing I ran into with my computer's onboard nvidia chipset.

The deal killer, though, was how poorly the board dealt with sleep and hibernation states. Specifically, the problems were going from...Read more