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Today we will be looking at the HD3450 from Diamond Multimedia. The HD 3450 is the lowest-cost alternative to the bigger and badder of the rest of ATI's current 3000 series of video cards. Though it comes with a small price tag, the HD 3450 has a feature set that makes it attractive to many people. The potential consumer that would be most interested in this video card would probably be someone who currently relies on integrated graphics solution (IGP) or a very old video card, and would like to upgrade to something that could handle 1080p  video and decode HD and Blu-ray DVD's.

The HD 3450 is also advertised for its ability to deliver "the next generation of HD games featuring life-like realism." Not many people out there picking up a $55 video card would expect  a miracle when it came down to game performance, but the ability to play DirectX10 games is a claim made for the Diamond HD 3450. So in this review, we decided to put this claim to the test. We will try out some of today's more popular games with a HD 3450 in an effort to see what kind of performance (or lack of) you can expect from such an inexpensive card. While the HD 3450 is not  supposed to be able to compete with a HD 3850, it is still nonetheless interesting to see how the performance levels compare.

Let's start this off with taking a look at the Diamond HD 3450:

As you can see, it is a relatively small card, and won't take very much real estate on your motherboard. Because of its small size, VGA, DVI, and HDMI output ports, it is well suited to be part of a HTPC setup. With HDCP support, Avivo HD Video and Display technology, and ATI's Unified Video Decoder technology, the HD 3450 should have no problem at all decoding high-definition videos and displaying these in all of their 1080p HD glory.

As for the specifications, the Diamond HD3450 has a core clock speed of 600 MHz, and 512MB of GDDR2 memory clocked at a speed of 500 MHz. While this core clock speed is actually fairly high for such an inexpensive card, the HD3450 has a 64-bit memory interface. When working in conjunction with this relatively slower memory, performance will be hampered. Furthermore, having 512MB of memory will hardly offer any improvement over what 256MB is capable of, in real-world situations.  Nonetheless, these shouldn't be taken as negatives -- did we mention that this video card is only about $50?

Size comparison between a PowerColor HD 3850, our Diamond HD 3450, and DVI to VGA adapter.

The Diamond HD 3450 has 40 stream processors that work hard crunching numbers in order to produce advanced graphics with DirectX 10.1, Shader Model 4.1, and OpenGL 2.0 in order to handle the latest games. If you wanted to boost that game performance a bit, the HD 3450 is capable of multi-GPU performance running in a CrossFireX configuration. As you may have guessed though, running two or more CrossFire'd HD 3450's makes about as much sense as getting a turbo-charger for a '88 Chevrolet Astro mini-van. However, CrossFireX is flexible, allowing you to combine up to four of any 3xxxx series cards together, and with Hybrid Crossfire you can get the HD 3450 to work with the integrated graphics processor on a 780G motherboard. While pairing a HD3450 to multiple 3xxx video cards isn't that effective because the HD3450 would limit performance of any faster video cards, the Hybrid Crossfire is a strong selling point for the card. This capability would make the HD 3450 particularly nice for anyone that already owns a 780G motherboard, and is looking for a cost effective upgrade to boost video performance.     

Features at a glance

• Superscale unified shader architecture
• PCI Express 2.0 support
• Direct X 10.1 / Shader Model 4.1 / OpenGL 2.0
• ATI Crossfire X Multi-GPU Support for highly scalable performance
• Up to four GPU support with an AMD 790FX based motherboard
• High-speed 128-bit-HDR (High Dynamic Range) rendering
• 55nm process technology
• ATI Avivo HD Video and Display Technology
• Game Physics processing capability
• Built-in HDMI with Multi-channel 5.1 surround audio
• Support for the ATI Radeon DVI to HDMI adapter
• Unified Video Decoder (UVD) for Blu-ray and HD DVD
• ATI PowerPlay energy conserving technology
• RoHS compliant
• Build in HDCP Support
• Windows Vista™ 3D environment Support

Now that we have gotten to know the Diamond HD 3450 a bit better, we are going to put some claims to the test and see what it is capable of when it comes to gaming.