Customer Rating:  
Summary: Not so great with Win 7
Comment: 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 sleep/hibernation to full power states. I was able to go from sleep to full power state just one time - on the subsequent attempts, the video would not turn on. It did a little better from hibernation - the video would come up, but the computer would slow to a crawl for about a full 5 minutes.
In the end, I took the card and the ati drives out of my computer, and now everything is working fine again. Is this a problem with Win 7 or HP firmware - I can't say.
Customer Rating:
Summary: Works as designed
Comment: It plays Star Craft 2, which is why I bought it. It's not bells and whistles hot, but it performs.
Customer Rating:
Summary: Works just fine, I was looking for a card to push to moniters
Comment: I work in a bank and we do not allow video games on the work pc;s. I needs a card that I could push two monitors at the same time. I have one hooked up through the DVI and the other HDMI. Works perfectly. Not much else to say. It works for want I need better than the card built into the mother board.
Customer Rating:
Summary: Great card for HTPCs
Comment: 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 is how little juice it uses. My total system power measured with a Kill-a-watt is about 40w at idle and web surfing, 55w while playing a blu-ray, and 80w while playing CoD2 MW. That is absolutely fantastic. In comparison my gaming rig pulls 350w at idle and almost 900w while gaming, sure its a great phallic extension, but is it really necessary?
I ran a 25' hdmi cable and a 25' usb cable(for the wireless keyboard/mouse dongles) through the wall to the back of my 55"er and my htpc is in my den with a 24" LG hooked in via DVI. I setup a hotkey to swap displays so this one little card either runs a 55" LED monster, or a modest little desktop PC. I considered a 5750 fanless, but those put out too much heat. I run the I3 fanless with a thermaltake hyper tx-3(the fan is connected but runs at 0% pwm until 50°C which the CPU never gets to), fanless video card, fanless power supply, with a single 120x38mm SilenX FDB running at 600rpm cooling everything and the drives are in silenX luxurae cases. The system is inaudible from anything over 6" from the fan inlet, and if one of the optical drives are spun up.
I'd dock this one star because it's the ddr2 version, but it's just that great of a little card it needs 5. For the same price pick up the ddr3 version or for a hair more the ddr5 version.
This isn't for gamers, this isn't a workhorse, this is a low power, low profile, low heat, SILENT card that works great.
Customer Rating:
Summary: Very nice HTPC video card
Comment: 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.
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