Asus ATI Radeon HD3450 512 MB DVI/VGA/HDMI Low Profile AGP Video Card AH3450/DI/512MD2(LP)

Comment: Quick, easy installation. I have a multiboot PC with XP, Vista Ultimate and Win7 Ultimate, and had no issues with install on any OS. Total installation time took less then 15 minutes. This card blew my old ATI Radeon 9600 right out of the water. Output is excellent. VGA was clear and crisp on my LCD monitor, as was the DVI, and the HDMI quality was flawless on my HDTV, and the digital audio through the HDMI was crystal clear. However, I did not know it had to be plugged into one of the Molex power cords. Since I had all of mine in use with the two optical drives and 6 hard disks, I just spliced in an extra connector I had from a dead PSU, and everything worked out pristine. Excellent card for the dollar.

Comment: I installed this card on a older (2003) Pentium 4 Gateway running Windows XP. It requires a Molex power cord, and luckily I had an extra one in the case. Popped the CD in, the software installed smoothly, and then I hooked up my HDTV with the VGA and HDMI outputs. Everything works fine, including sound on HDMI. A nice way to get HDMI output for the money.

Comment: It plain old "ROCKS"! And easy to install "Even if you are a caveman"!

Comment: I purchased this card for the HDMI output and HDCP compliance. It's a great card to update an aging machine; even works with 64-bit Windows OS's without having to go searching for drivers.

Comment: If you intend to use this for HD playing for H.264 encoding using DXVA, you are wasting time. I finally returned this item.

1. Installation/Uninstallation very difficult
This card is very difficult to plug in the AGP. Need extra power connector or a Y connector. The fan housing actually blocks AGP lock so if you want to unplug the card, you cannot get the lock and unlock it from AGP. I almost broke my finger nail for that. If there are motherboard capacitor nearby, be extremely careful

2. The normal driver for ATI does not work. You need to get the hotfix for AGP. I followed many websites' suggestion to enable the DXVA, nothing got worked out as expected. Only 1 HD clip worked with DXVA activated when using MPC HC. I just don't understand why the DXVA is so difficult to work on this card. Later, I purchased a PNY NVidia 8400 GS PCI, it worked mostly.

The conclusion is that ATI is lagging behind on NVidia big time on HD playing. Things are totally different now. I still remember that ATI was so good in 2001.