Introduction

Mistakes happen; I'll be the first to admit that and when it comes to the HIS HD 5450, sample mistakes happened. When they originally asked if I wanted to look at the model I said since we'd already looked at two, if it didn't offer us anything over the ones we had looked at already then we wouldn't be interested.

The thing I like about HIS along with a few other companies I deal with; I can be blunt with them and they won't take offence. These low end models are only so interesting and once we've looked at one or two we're not really all that interested in having a look at any more.

Anyway, they gave me that normal marketing spiel; it's low profile, well, yes, so are the other two we looked at. It's got passive cooling, that's great, but so do the other two. Anyway, they let us know they were going to ship over this version of the card. Out of the box this card has the low profile bracket installed; it does include the high profile bracket which is also good news. The other main difference is the fact that this one comes with 1GB of memory instead of 512MB. Well, I've made my feelings quite clear, even recently on my own blog here on how I feel about 1GB memory on low end cards, but you know what; whatever!

So, I said what the hell, send it over, I'll check it out. What was great is that HIS said, "We will send it to you to take a look as the one we've got is with Eyefinity ready. If you don't think it will be a good model that's fit for your readership, then you can just put it in your library as reference :)." I give big Kudos to HIS for this and mostly for that reason I actually took the time to review the model. Not everything went to plan, though. Let's see what happens when we look at the card and bundle.