ASUS EAH3450/DI/512M Radeon HD 3450 512MB 64-bit DDR PCI-E 8X HDCP Ready Low Profile Ready Video Card

I bought the card to create a Home Theater PC because of it's fanless design, HDMI connector, and relatively low cost. Looks great when playing Blu-Ray with PowerDVD or TotalMedia DVD players. The card is sufficient for Vista Media Center for Standard definition playback, although there is high GPU usage.
Unfortunately the high-definition TV playback with Media Center is unwatchable. The ATI Avivo decoder for the card are not completely compatable with Vista Media Center. Unless you configure VMC to use some third party decoders (i.e. PowerDVD ultra), you can pretty much forget about HD in Windows Media Center.

This card ties in with my onboard Advanced Crossfire video card (ECS Black Edition Motherboard), giving me almost a gig of video memory.

I've used this in my Vista Media Center, and now my Windows 7 Media Center. It works great. I have an HD-DVD and a Blu-Ray drive and both formats play flawlessly using ArcSoft or PowerDVD. My main video sources are 1080p MKV files and it also plays those with no problems. I also have 3 different displays connected to the card(an HDTV, a projector, and an LCD Monitor)all work fine, although configuring them was tricky and the drivers seem to "forget" the settings once in a while. I blame my setup, not the card or the software
My media PC has a lower model Core2 Duo that runs at idle when watching 720p, but it runs at about 60-70% when watching anything 1080p. So I cannot recommend this card for a slower PC as it will not handle all HD video by itself, but if you have a mid to high-end PC that just needs a video card to supplement the heavy lifting and has HDMI output, this card works great.
Oh, BTW, this card is NOT for video games. Period. It barely runs WoW at 16x12...Read more