HIS-HD3450_20080125143607656

I know I don’t normally write about graphics cards for some reason. I suppose I find the whole industry just utterly boring these days. It’s just about NVIDIA vs. ATI and who can crank out faster and faster processors with more vertex pipelines and more SLI like connections.. yada yada yada.. boring. Don’t get me wrong though - I used to work in the graphics industry but back in the late 90’s, it was just utterly neat to see how one could even just achieve 30 fps at 1024 x 768 with double buffering support!!! Ah.. the good old days.. and we even 3DFX in the fray too! Fast forward to now.. and we’ve got a pretty blah industry.

So what gets me to write about graphics cards? Every so often, I see a card that I would be interested in owning for my next PC (or my next Home Theater PC). These days, I’m fixated on anything with HDMI support.. so when I saw the latest HIS graphics card get announced, I was somewhat interested! The new HIS Radeon HD 3450 Silence HDMI 256MB DDR2 graphics comes with an integrated video/audio HDMI connector. This is pretty neat because many graphics cards that offer HDMI output typically only offer video on the HDMI signal. Audio still typically goes out on an S/PDIF connection on the PC which somewhat defeats the purpose of an HDMI connection. Now, this HIS product isn’t the first graphics card to do that of course - it just happens to be one I saw tonight :)

OK.. so other features of the HIS Radeon HD 3450 Silence include:

  • Support for 1080p playback
  • Built in 5.1 surround audio (AC3) pass-through capabilities - single cabe carries both HD video and 5.1 surround audio
  • Support for DirectX 10 and DirectX 10.1 API
  • ATI Radeon HD 3600 Series GPU with clock speed up to 600Hz and memory speed up to 800MHz
  • Support for ATI CrossFireX Multi-GPU technology
  • HIS iFan Cooling Technology
  • Quiet - with less than 20dB in sound
  • 256 MB (64 bit)DDR2 memory
  • Superscalar unified shader architecture
  • 40 stream processing units
  • PCI Express 2.0 support
  • 24x Custom Filter Anti-Aliasing
  • ATI Avivo HD Video and Display Technology
  • ATI PowerPlay energy conserving technology

[Check it out]

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