Sapphire Radeon HD5450 512 MB DDR2 VGA/DVI/HDMI PCI-Express Video Card 100291L

Finally, a low profile, FANLESS, bitstreaming card. Ideal in a low end HTPC. Delivers beautiful Blu-Ray video and enables Blu-Ray audio bitstreaming. Blu-Ray bitstreaming, a holy grail of the HTPC crowd, used to cost $200+ (installation headaches included for free). This card will do it for under $50 although you still need a software player such as Arcsoft TMT 3 (bitstreaming feature currently in public beta). Includes two low profile brackets.

Caveat, this card is not for gamers. It's fast enough for HTPC use but slow for gaming.

This is not a typical product review, because I am using the board in somewhat unconventional installation.

The Dell Dimension 3100 has two PCI slots and just one PCI-e 1X slot. It does not have any 8X or 16X PCI-e slots. Shucks. I was able to install and run Windows 7 with Aero on a 3D-Fusion FX5500 PCI board but the performance was jerky even though it scored 2.8 on the Windows 7 performance page.

I found that this ATI HD5450 with 512MB could be had for 30 Shemolians after rebate so I bought it. But just one problem, the X1 connector slot on the Dell motherboard is of the type that only accepts X1 boards because the front of the connector is shrouded just like the back and a X8 or X16 board will not install without modifying the connector on either the motherboard or on the video card.

I used my Dremel with a diamond grinding bit to put a notch in the front of the X1 slot that allowed me to install this X16 board. The surgery took about 2...Read more

I can not recommend the Sapphire Radeon HD5450 more highly! This is a great card for the money for anyone needing a basic card. It is fully featured, with HDMI (and full support for audio over HDMI!), so anyone looking to hook up a HTPC or presentation computer to a projector or flat panel would benefit from this card. I purchased it so I could run dual monitors at work, and it is performing quite well. Installation was a breeze, and the drivers installed without a hitch. I had multiple options on how to configure my dual monitors, and figuring them out was easy and intuitive. Another benefit is that since the card has no fan, only a passive heat sink, the card is totally silent, again, a great benefit for HTPCs! If you are a gamer, I would recommend a more powerful card...this card IS DirectX 11 compatible, but it doesnt have much 3D horsepower for the latest games. That being said, for the price, you cant really complain about its shortcomings.