14 DAY TRIAL // Sapphire just announced that it has expanded its product portfolio with a new Radeon HD 6450 graphics card from its well known FleX series that was specially designed to provide multi-monitor capabilities to entry-level systems.
The new graphics card is officially called the Sapphire HD 6450 FleX and it features a low-profile PCB as well as passive heatsink, making it a great solution for HTPC users.
Its home theater PC role is also accentuated by the bundled low-profile expansion bracket, which is a great addition if the card must be fitted in a half-height computer case.
The rest of the card's specs include a Caicos GPU with 160 stream processors, 8 texture units and 4 ROP units that are linked to the installed video buffer via a 64-bit wide memory bus.
The memory used by Sapphire is DDR3 and is clocked at 1.6GHz (data rate), while the GPU has an operating frequency of 625MHz.
Compared to AMD's reference design for the HD 6450, Sapphire’s solution is actually slower as the DDR3 memory used provides a great deal less bandwidth than the 900MHz (3.6GHz data rate) GDDR5 recommended.
Despite the slightly lower memory operating frequency, the most important feature of the new Sapphire graphics card is its FleX design that allows for a more flexible display arrangement when in EyeFinity mode as it support three DVI monitors without the need for costly DisplayPort active adapters.
The first two monitors are connected to the two DVI ports and the third to an HDMI to DVI cable, which is supplied in the box.
No information regarding pricing and availability was supplied by Sapphire, but this new HD 6450 FleX should be a great option for users interested in building a multi-monitor setup on the cheap.