I'm looking to replace a video card my little one managed to kill by powering on and off my PC. I don't play any games on this PC, instead it is used to watch videos and as a guest PC. A lot of my videos are in the DIVX, DIVX-HD, h.264, or mpeg format. And from reading the specs of the three cards mentioned, they all help off load the video processing work from the CPU. Just not sure which would satisfy my needs? My system config is: C2D E4500 2GB DDR400 onboard audio
the HD3450 will be the one to look at. ATi cards focuses on picture quality over graphics card speed. but if you decide to game a little on the computer, the HD3850 would be a better buy.
Since the Radeon 3K cards are all PCI-e 2.0, from what I understand they are backwards compatible, will I be getting the full 40 streaming pipelines if plugged into a PCI-e 1.0 slot? Actually how much of the overall card throughput will be lost, if any?
everything will still be there; it's the bandwith that's capped to half the speed. 2.0 doubles the bandwith over 1.0. you probably won't see the difference with videos, but it will most likely show in gaming, especially graphic intensive games.
sounds good to me. not light gaming at all, so I guess the 3450 should be more than adequate. thanks for the help.
you'll have no problems watching videos. i have the HD3870, and my motherboard only has standard pci-e x16, but i can watch 720p videos with no problems (monitor has max resolution of 1440x900). divx has no problems either.
I'm looking into getting a fanless solution so the 3450 should do the trick. I do find many more 8400GS' for a lot less money, so for the price though, aside from video quality, would or should it be able to handle the h.264 and DIVX-HD content?
it'll handle video playback better than onboard graphics, that's for sure. both cards can handle h.264, but not sure if the 8400GS can do divx; ATi AVIVO supports divx but unsure if nVidia PureVideo does.. ATi AVIVO nVidia PureVideo also, if you're going with a fanless setup, make sure the inside of your computer case has good airflow inside. improper cooling will cause the card to overheat, and potentially damage the card.
I was originally leaning toward the Nvidia option because it had linux drivers available already. However, per your recommendation and further review, the ATI is a cooler running part, so for fanless operation it should be better. The card is actually going into a slim case, Silverstone LC-11 . It has a total of 3 case fans + the PSU one (which doesn't help much anyway. From looking at the specs of the various 3000 series I like the HD 3600 batch better, but the price is not right. In the end I'm gonna place the order for this card.
I finally got the video card in the system and have been running it for about one week now. Just wanted to say thanks for the suggestion. ATI's AVIVO-HD technology is truly amazing, like a review I read, it really does upconvert SD-DVD's much better than any upconverting DVD player I've seen or used. It's by no means, HD quality, but the image is definitely cleaner/smoother on screen. The fanless vid card also helped remove an annoying whine my old x1600 GPU fan made..now I just need to find some quieter case fans, 80mm. Any good suggestions on those? Thanks again. -Jason
i hear scythe fans are very quiet. those fans might be suited for your pc. antec tricool fans are nice. they're three speed fans, so you can leave it on low or medium settings for quiet operation. high may be audible during video playback. an alternative is to use the zalman fan mate 2 controller. it's a knob type controller that varies the voltage between 5v-11v. you can use it on any 3-pin header on the motherboard, so you can use it on the cpu heatsink or your exhaust fan.
