Sapphire Radeon HD 6450 FleX Edition Graphics Card Review

The card is very small and low-profiled, which makes it perfect for a HTPC user or less frequent gamer. It comes on a blue PCB with a passive heatsink design. Due to the low profile design, it should fit in the majority of computer systems with little to no trouble at all.

The majority of the card is taken up by the passive design cooler. The cooler is black and features a Sapphire logo upon it. Being passive, there is no noise from the cooler and straight away gives us a good idea of how low power this particular card may be. We’ll see later on as to how good it is at dissipating the heat from the core.

Being aimed at a specific market, we find a low-profile bracket being included with the card for those with a slim-line case. This simply replaces the current standard bracket, and incorporates all of the same display outputs.

Being a FleX card, we find two DVI ports, one being a single link, while the other is dual-link and an HDMI port for some extreme Eyefinity action, which is obviously the whole point behind the FleX range of cards.

The supplied dongle can easily be installed into the HDMI port to allow a total of three DVI outputs, as it’s a more common connection than HDMI, so allows you to decide which connection to use.

The card comes in with stock speeds of 625MHz GPU clock and a 800Mhz memory clock. This card isn’t aimed at the extreme gamer, and whilst we could overclock the card, with a passive cooling design, it could always lead to problems that we’d rather avoid due to temperatures.