Sapphire HD 6450 1 GB Passive

[W1zzard]

Sapphire's HD 6450 comes with a low-profile design, passive heatsink and native full-size HDMI. Together with AMD's UVD 3 video encode acceleration that provides excellent video decode capabilities this could well be your next HTPC card.

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[cheesy999]

why does it have the same FPS at all res on the f1 Test?

 

[W1zzard]

why does it have the same FPS at all res on the f1 Test?

due to an engine bug there is a certain minimum fps below which the game will not go

 

[Delta6326]

I'm surprised that they didn't ship the faster AMD ones for that money you might as well go buy the 520 or something. But it would be an improvement on integrated graphics.

 

[Casecutter]

Well that was a waste… We knew testing this lower iteration, like the original isn’t for gaming or at least never for genre of the titles used in W1zzards enthusiasts’ gauntlet. This is a HTPC card; not even an upgrade for some basic OEM box straddled IGP mobo. It’s just the AIB’s (Sapphire) way to cheap'n-up and deceive buyers into thinking thier getting some deal. I believe putting blame on AMD for these "cut-backs" isn't reality based, insinuating this has more to do with AMD than its' AIB partner's isn't being honest or apportioning the reality of marketing and the market place.

Fault isn't with the product or configuration, but with the format and execution of such "canned" reviews, and could say most of W1zzards informed readers were fully expecting his final ruling. While I do agree that this is "slower in 3D" (in such tests here) against the Nvidia G520 it's all irrelevant. What folk need to know is the difference in decode time, video, playback etc. I do like that the last bit of the conclusion spelling out what this card is intended to provide, but to overall give it a beat-down is almost a bully pulpit.

What you did hit on... is very quickly the market will have no need for such cards. With the onset of APU’s these will finally be something kept around to diagnosis on-board problems or used as a fix if a mobo has a bad IGP chip.

One thing, 6450 or GT520... neither will bring anything to have the worth in touting PhysX, so it shouldn't be a negative for AMD… Cuda I’ll give you that.

Lastly these could be selling for $35 No Rebate the way AMD and partners like this have set price previously. You'll be lucky to find a "single slot passive" GT520 (if they make one) for less than $40 after a rebate, or at least here in the States.

 

[Spectrobozo]

that's terrible, if they could keep the clocks at 750Mhz for the GPU and something like 900MHz for the DDR3 at least it would be much closer, but 625/666 is killing the performance...

it's a shame that almost all the 6450 are like this one... but probably there are some with even lower memory clocks!
but the same happens to some GT 520 (but in a much smaller proportion)

BUT you can find the original review edition here for 59
SAPPHIRE 100321DDR5OCL Radeon HD 6450 512MB GDDR5 ...

 

[Jonap_1st]

cheaper 4650 can beat this card to the hell..
also there are no differences between this card to $40 5450's for HTPC

$50?? (bluffing..~)

 

[Steevo]

For a silent HTPC that offers BETTER video acceleration and playback optimization compared to all other offerings. I don't know if anyone even noticed the fact that this is a HTPC card, not a gaming card, or a save the world card. video playback and enhancement. It is a win.


Its just bi-winning hat it can be overclocked.

 

[Widjaja]

Radeon cards should be gauged by the second number in their model.
From what I have experienced, anything under 6, is starting to get on the thrifty side for gaming no matter what the generation is.

You only have to look at the card to realize the most likely purpose for this card.

As stated in previous posts HTPC and HTPCs really ned to be more on the quiet side than to have loads of fans and roaring GPUs when on max load.

 

[qubit]

I think we are getting cheated with these low end cards - notice how the performance never increases? I reckon this card likely has performance similar to a GeForce 6200 from five years ago.

When it comes to mid and high end cards, the performance per generation gets better at each price point, but that doesn't happen here, so we are getting increasingly short-changed. In some cases performance even goes down, like the GeForce 520.

This 6450 should be able to play all of these games properly at 1024x768 at least, but it's a slideshow instead. :shadedshu

 

[Jstn7477]

I reckon this card likely has performance similar to a GeForce 6200 from five years ago.

You're kidding, right? My 6450, which is the GDDR5 version, plays TF2 at 1920*1080 and most high settings with 30FPS or greater. I have a GeForce 7300 LE from 2006 (basically a PCIe 6200 but it has higher clocks and is 90nm vs. 110nm) and that thing barely has any balls in TF2 or Windows 7 for that matter.

The reason why this Sapphire card in the review sucks balls is because: a)It's 64bit DDR3, and the GPU needs much more bandwidth, and b) The clockspeeds on this sample are slow as f***. My Sapphire 6450 GDDR5 flashed with the original ATI ES GDDR5 BIOS from W1zzard's first 6450 512MB easily does 875/1100(4400 GDDR5 with ~35GB/s of bandwidth) and that blows away this card.

My GDDR5 64bit 6450 (160 SPUs/4 ROPs) has significantly more memory bandwidth than my laptop's 400 SPU/ 8 ROP Mobility Radeon HD 5650 with 1GB 128bit DDR3. I wish card vendors would stop putting s***ty outdated high-capacity RAM on their cards to make them look better, because in reality it makes the cards have no balls.

Anyone remember how much better the DDR version of the GeForce4 MX440 was compared to the SDRAM version? You could keep overclocking the DDR RAM and the card would keep getting faster without even touching the core clock. Low-end cards get no bandwidth and crappy clocks, and that's why the suck as much as they do.

 

[Casecutter]

And so maybe Sapphire (AMD allows) cuts memory type and clocks, but now Nvidia GT520 are countering by slashing the memory-bandwidth and pricing is up… so W1zzard where do you stand now?

EVGA had the 128-Bit 01G-P3-1432-LR and now their moving a 01G-P3-1335-KR
And the difference being... The -LR was a 128-Bit or 22.4 Gb/s of band width vs. 9.6 Gb/s for the 64-Bit
http://www.evga.com/products/pdf/01G-P3-1335.pdf
Here's the -LR info
http://www.evga.com/products/pdf/01G-P3-1432.pdf

I think I’d like to see a real HTPC review face off and with the noise level, as it should be a concern as this GT520 still has a fan.

 

[dj-electric]

super-low Power consumption, awesome

 

[Radys]

Yet another HTPC card tested like a gaming card in demanding games and with no image quality tests (the most important thing for cards like that one). This is getting funny.

 

[cheesy999]

no image quality tests

considering most HTPC users use HDMI or DVI i think thats not really too relevant anymore

 

[corvaxmuzzy]

Thank you for the review

[I resurrected this thread to offer thanks, to offer suggestions, and to offer personal, owner's-insight after having owned the card for 11 months. I hope that my suggestions are considered for future reviews of HTPC cards.]

1. Thank you for taking the time to test the card.

2. Would it be easy to have 2 variations/tracks of HTPC card reviews? Maybe one drop-down menu for each:
I. One for adults (sans games). ZING!
II. One with games.

3. The Sapphire card is underclocked & fitted with DDR3 for a reason. There is a large market segment that wants cards aimed at HTPC needs (decoding media + low noise + low power + low profile). I imagine that many of you gamers skipped over the power consumption. That is the single-most important result for me! I'm not the only one! Sapphire's 6450 was not intended to be a gamer's card. Some other tests that might be of interest to HTPC users:
I. Actually testing the multi-monitor capabilities (can you actually use all 3 ports on this card? Prove it/test it.).
II. Test different media files on different softwares + multiple instances (Can it display 1080i streaming content on one monitor while, por ejemplo, a 1080p MKV or BDr is playing on another monitor) + multiple monitors...
III. (At the risk of being flamed...I have zero OS loyalty, by the way) Stick the card in a Hackintosh box (or Apple Mac Pro) & a *nix box & a FreeBSD box. See if it is supported, and maybe test basic, basic functions.
IV. Underclocking potential & subsequent power-consumption results (as it is a HTPC card).

4. I have owned this card for almost a year. It does its job well (playing media files & playing games (friends & nieces)). The card is further underclocked & undervolted to draw (my best guess) @10W max. It is in a custom SFF HTPC (with poor air circulation); the specs are as follows:
---------
Celeron 450 (this is a mobile, Socket M, processor: SL9KX) (undervolted)
2GB 800Mhz RAM
30GB SSD 3GB/s (started with an ATA-100 PATA that passed away)
80W PSU @96% efficiency
---------

The card cost me $20.00 (US), after a MIR & coupon code. The card was an absolute steal.

 

[Peter1986C]

The Sapphire card is underclocked & fitted with DDR3 for a reason. There is a large market segment that wants cards aimed at HTPC needs (decoding media + low noise + low power + low profile). I imagine that many of you gamers skipped over the power consumption. That is the single-most important result for me! I'm not the only one! Sapphire's 6450 was not intended to be a gamer's card. Some other tests that might be of interest to HTPC users.

That it differs from the reference card (clock speeds, RAM type) still matters for certain uses especially for (multimonitor) productivity purposes that don't require a 2D workstation card (e.g. Quadro NVS) but are still somewhat too demanding to use e.g. the integrated graphics that office PCs come with. Sorry for my rather vague way of putting it; and sorry for giving you a cookie of your own dough, but there is more than just HTPC users .

III. (At the risk of being flamed...I have zero OS loyalty, by the way) Stick the card in a Hackintosh box (or Apple Mac Pro) & a *nix box & a FreeBSD box. See if it is supported, and maybe test basic, basic functions.

1) Apple found it an excellent (cough) idea to demand special firmware to be put on the card (to let it identify itself as a "iMac" card) so we can forget about Mac Pros. Hackingtoshes are impossible to because it will eventually lead to W1zzard and Cadaveca not getting any review samples anymore.
2) Except the gaming benchmark "Heaven" there are no cross-platform graphics benchmarking programs I can think of. Important if you wish to keep comparing properly.
Basic functionality should work anyway so there is no need to test that. AMD supports Linux with official drivers (at least on the X86 and X86_64 architectures, not on IA64, PPC etc.) and the Xorg Radeon f/oss drivers support everything up to Southern Islands (HD 7xxx) as well (although certain things like UVD decoding, tesselation etc. may not work (yet)).

On a sidenote, it's funny how you put Linux under "*nix" while you mentioned FreeBSD seperately. FreeBSD and Linux are both "derivatives" of UNIX and thus are both being *nix systems (as well as other BSD varieties like PC-BSD and NetBSD).