HD3450

[Iain1974]

My wife has a low profile case for her Sabayon PC. It's about 3 yrs old (I think) with a 939 mobo, Foxconn micro board I'm sorry but I can't remember the nodel number but it was the first micro NF4 board available. PCI-Express slot. The CPU is

It's current graphics card is a 6200TC with I think 64MB on-board. Can't remember but may have only been 32MB but don't quote me. We have a single stick of 512MB of Crucials value line DDR3200.

I think the power supply is a 250W that came with the Antec Minuet case. I'm guessing the HD3450 shouldn't be terribly demanding.

We use it for light office work, web-surfing/video's and the occasional built-in game - some of which are 3D. Frames can be a little jerky in the built in flight-sim.

Half-height cards are hard to come by at sensible prices and the soon to be released 3450 seems a perfect fit - so long as there's a VGA flavour.

Would we be better off with investing a modest $50 in the new 3450 or given our uses or is the current card likely to be sufficient?

We're not looking to re-build anytime soon.

Thanks in advance for any advice/suggestions.

 

[yipsl]

I think it would be worth it for HD video playback. You could also add a Bluray drive later, when the price drops. It should be faster than a 6200 in games, but still not capable of handling many of today's DX 10 titles alone. It will handle any older game playable on the 6200, but that stutters.

Note that I mentioned alone. AMD/ATI gears their 3450's and 3470's to the hybrid Crossfire market, as well as the HTPC market. Once the RS780 hybrid Crossfire drivers are out and reliable, then the motherboard will be released outside of China.

Though you might not be upgrading soon, if you do get a 3450, you could move it over to a hybrid Crossfire board with a 1.8 gigahertz Phenom 9000 in a couple of years and have a nice low power system that should handle HTPC duties quite well. I'm considering that combination for my HTPC, instead of just using the X2 3800+ and 690G board.

I can't wait to see the shootout at the low end of the market, hybrid Crossfire with RS480 and 3450 vs. hybrid SLI with 9400gs or whatever Nvidia names it.

http://www.anandtech.com/video/showdoc.aspx?i=3178