Rage3D Home Page

Discuss This Article

 

 

Page List

Go To Next Page

Go To Last Page

Sapphire Radeon HD 6450 fleX edition Graphics Card Review

Product: Sapphire Radeon HD 6450 fleX edition
Company: Sapphire
Author: James Prior
Editor: Charles Oliver
Date: February 27th, 2012

Introduction

Sapphire's HD 6450 fleX edition card is based on the Caicos GPU. An evolution of the ATI Radeon HD 5450, the Caicos GPU was first released in April 2011, our HD 6450 launch review saw the HD 6450 provide a significant increase in performance for the low end discrete GPU.

View Image Sapphire Radeon HD 6450 FLEX Edition

View Image Sapphire Radeon HD 6450 FLEX Edition

Sapphire fleX edition offers three innovations over the original HD 6450. Firstly, giving the card its name is the inclusion of circuitry to allow three 'legacy' displays to be connected for triple display output. AMD's Eyefinity technology relies on DisplayPort to drive more than two concurrent displays, unless an active DisplayPort to DVI, HDMI or VGA adapter is used. Sapphire has integrated this additional adapter into the PCB of the fleX edition, allowing them to offer out of the box triple display support. Secondly, the card is equipped with 1GB of VRAM, vs. the reference design 512MB. Thirdly, the card is half-height (with included backplane adapter) and passively cooled.

Sapphire Radeon HD 6450 fleX edition Specifications:

• 40nm Northern Islands series Caicos GPU
• 370M transistors / 67mm2
• 160 Stream Processors (2 SIMD / Terascale 2 VLIW5)
• 625MHz Engine Clock
• 1GB DDR3 VRAM
• 800MHz Memory Clock (1.6gbps effective data rate)
• 64-bit memory bus (12.8 GB/s bandwidth)
• 8 Texture Units
• 4 ROPs
• Dual DVI-DL + HDMI 1.4a outputs with HDMI-DVI dongle, DVI-VGA dongle
• DirectX 11.0 / OpenGL 4.2 / OpenCL 1.1
• 200GFLOPS Single Precision Compute performance
• Half-height PCB with full size & half size backplane bracket
• 9W idle / 20W load
• PCI-Express 2.1 x16 interface
• $79USD SEP

Sapphire offers a number of AMD Radeon HD 6400 series cards - 8 to be exact, so there is obviously some overlap. While AMD's reference specifications left a lot of wiggle room for partner differentiation in clock speeds and memory types/amounts, the addition of fleX technology is pure Sapphire innovation.