Exclusive: AMD Radeon HD 3400 Series Coming

A 64bit buss? Hmmm, and people rag[ged] on the 7600GT for only being 128bit...

The half-height sounds like a custom job for those little Dell heater-boxes.

64-bit bus? That has to be OEM.

These are clearly not "Enthusiast Cards".

However, they should fit nicely into Retail systems with weak PSUs and limited cooling.

Combine this with the upcoming feature for AMD to combine the power of the built-in GPU with an add-on GPU and you get a mild uptick in performance.

Mind you, I don't see anyone who visits this site and designs a custom build to select one of these cards. However, the Millions who shop CirCuit City and BestBuy for their PCs, might have a nice little card to speed up solitaire.

If AMD can sell a large number of these, even at $2-$3 profit each, it can help their bottom line.

I guess AMD/ATI has given-up competing with NVidia.

(zenmaster) is right, if they sell a bunch of these cards as OEM to Dell/HP/etc... at a small markup, it'll help them i guess

This suks, I haet it wen low ind prawducks have bad specs.

Oh, Looking at the specs, they are going to be real low end performance. I'm wagering 8400 level performance.

Definitely not Crysis Quality :>>

They will simply be very cheap options to toss into Retail systems without requiring the OEM builders to redesign the case for cooling or up the GPU. Meanwhile, not only will they be better than the integrated GPU, they will get to add the limited power of the integrated GPU.

For all of you WoW fans, it's likely a great setup.
For the folks buying $100+ cards, it's not your cup of tea.
If you are buying $200+ cards, it will be like cyanide in your veins :>

LOL ppl are trashing the low end cards.

these will sell between 75-150$

if you want some performance "splurge" and get a 3850 for $ 170

for the price it will do whats it ment to do. Spread sheets and duel monitors.

Hate to break it to you but the "performance" GPU market is a VERY small market compared to the business gpu computer market.

and i would take this over integrated graphics ANY day.

I think this is the stuff that gets readers upset. We get early information on card like the low end 3400, which theres nothing wrong with, but THG happens to be one of the last major hardware sites to review an 8800GTS (G92). So... I dont know what to say.

I just meant that AMD/ATI really needs to make some money, hopefully now they will.

Hmm. Looks like it could be a pretty decent HTPC card. I have been meaning to build one of those... Let us pray that it is in the sub $100 range.

fixt

uhm, no 3850 is not lower-end, its lower mid-level, while 3870 is mainstream mid-level, and 8800GT is upper mid-level, 2600xt/pro and 8600GTS/GT are lower end cards...

Yeah the HD34xx series never seemed geared towards heavy gaming, it's obviously a an HTPC and "Office Box" candidate for primarily 2D and HD acceleration with mild 3D performance.

Low profile and passive cooling and you have an enormous market for that which will likely be a very profitable card.

For a 2D editing workstation I can't think of a better card (this will likely also be the platform from which they make their next FireMV cards IMO).

And if you were to use the whole CrossfireX Hybrid SLi concept for the energy saving, then this would be a companion to the heavy lifting gaming card, where this does your office apps and browsing, while another card does the gaming.

Still would prefer just a more efficient card more able to disable functional units on the fly, but at least both companies can pretend they're doing something about the high power consuming card situation (by having you spend more money and buy a 2nd card ).

True enough on that, and knowin them it would be an SE model whatever the new number is equivalent to 3401 maybe?

I always get confused when I see people whining about non high-end cards... I mean, some of you enthusiasts *DO* recognize that we're a very select few, no?

To my eyes, The HD 3400 series seems to have a very large audience ready for it. Namely, I see it covering three main things:

• HD content. Previously, as I recall, the Radeon HD 2600 series was what you had to take for H.264 & HDCP support. The fct that this runs with less power, AND also (3450) is available as a low-profile card will make this an excellent choice for HTPCs.
• Multi-Monitor Support. Historically, this has always been the domain of low-end cards; those looking for this generally just need more real estate for their 2D apps, so they needn't pay more for stuff that won't do THEM any more good.
• Low-intensity games. Zenmaster was right here: this will be a killer card for those ~9 million subscribers to World of WarCraft. I think that the gamers among us (almost all of us) are forgetting that out favored titles like Crysis, World in Conflict, and Unreal Tournament III make up a very, VERY small portion of the gaming market; you could add together the sales of those games, and it wouldn't even come CLOSE to the number of people that log into WoW every month.

I'm sure that for the above markets, the ability to get enough power and features to do what they want perfectly, for well under $100US, would be a godsend.

Oh no, they dare make a non-top-of-the-line card! Obviously, this must mean that nVidia gave up against competing long ago in 2004, when they produced the GeForce 6600GT, which if memory serves, still is their best-retail-selling card in history.

You act like they aren't making money off of the console market, what with >10 million Xenos GPUs and Hollywood GPUs...

I was fairly certain it surpassed the Ti 4200, if only by a small margin, and largely due, perhaps, to increases in overall market size.

As for the GeForce 2 MX? Remember that there were three different models, and as I recall, at least one of them was OEM-only... I did take care to insert the word "retail" in there.

Though in all honesty, both of those cards (well, the Ti 4200 to a lesser degree) would back up the exact same point.

Agreed. But someone could use it as a placeholder graphics card until they can upgrade. (I have a 8400GS [@690/500] on a box, and waiting for dual GPU cards )

Here is what it's perfect for:

Phenom 9000 65watt 1.8 gigahertz
Antec True Power 500 watt tier 3 PSU
RS780G hybrid Crossfire board
2 gigs Kingston DDR2 800
ATI 3450
TV Wonder 650
750 gig Seagate
Bluray drive
DVD-R+/RW

The 3450 is a perfect for an HTPC.

I was going to do a similar configuration with a legacy X2 3800+ on a 690G board using only the 4 pixel pipeline integrated video, but a low power Phenom with a low cost card and a hybrid Crossfire board will be even better.

Similar new HTPC configurations can be done with the 8400 and a hybrid SLI board. The day is coming when a low end card never needs to be lonely again!

If a low end card means giving up on the high end market, then that's what Nvidia did with the FX5200! Me, I still like the midrange market, so I'll get this for our two PC's.

http://www.newegg.com/Product/Prod [...] 6814125086

When I do build an HTPC, then it will be with a 3470 (just read about those), a TV Wonder 650 and a Phenom 9000. I can wait.