PowerColor HD 3450 Graphics Card
The PowerColor HD 3450 makes a great home theatre personal computer graphics card for great movies and high definition video playback as well as a fair gaming graphics card.
Ease of Use, Performance: 18/25, Look & Feel: 18/25,
Features 20/25, How much I enjoy 18/25
Total: 74/100
PowerColor brings another graphics card that is not exactly what it seems in the HD 3450 silent cooling system graphics card. This card is not exactly what it seems though as it is more of a multimedia video card for watching movies and playing videos and not really geared toward the gaming graphics processor.
The card comes with a great set of features for video and high definition technology and runs well for video as well as high definition video but does not work so well for gaming. This is due to the lower clock frequency of the low end video card. The HD 3450 graphics card does make a great HTPC card for great low power consumption and quiet graphics processing for great multimedia computers.
An HTPC or home theatre personal computer is a great way to include all the high end graphics and multimedia benefits of a computer like internet download capabilities into a home entertainment center. The benefits of creating a home theatre system from a computer may not be for everyone but there is still a great following and I for one would love to set up my own someday. But for now I have my two computers for gaming and general use as well as another that also has a small form factor motherboard that works great as a test bed for HTPC components.
I installed the HD 3450 in three computers and found it was not only fairly easy to install, ATI cleaning and install is never totally easy, but worked very well. The low power consumption means you can run the HD 3450 without additional power to the card and only from the motherboard. You can also have the benefit of low noise due to the silent heat sink design of the card.
I installed it in one computer and tried to get the noise level down as much as possible with only two fans running in the whole system. With a large heat sink assembly for the CPU with no fan and only one fan for exhaust the system worked fine and was very quiet. The noisiest component was pretty much a tie between the power supply fan and the drive when it would run up at times. There was no other noise from the system and it was quiet enough to run as a media center while watching movies.
The HD 3450 has a good sized heat sink that runs fine at regular operating temperatures and in gaming but the gaming performance is just not there. I ran both PCMark05 and 3DMark06 to find results that were very low for gaming but just fine for video and movies. The use of Crossfire without any bridge interconnect is also a nice feature but you will not get much in the way of playable scores using Crossfire for gaming on current high end games.