Sapphire Radeon HD 3450 512MiB
At the very last minute, we managed to get our hands on only one of the three SKUs being officially launched today - the Radeon HD 3450.
Sapphire will be launching a HD 3000-series-wide range of cards with, most likely, more than one SKU per GPU. The low-power nature of Radeon HD 3450, helped in turn by the 55nm process, means that, like most, the card ships with a passive hetasink.
The one difference here is that Sapphire has added double the usual framebuffer, totalling 512MiB. That'll mean less-frequent accesses to main system memory and should help performance when image quality is dialled up to anything above 1,024x768, we reckon.
The pricing of the low-end SKU is absolutely critical, though, and adding 256MiB of DDR2 memory will increase the cost to around £30, including VAT, or £3-5 more expensive than absolutely default-specified models.
Underneath that heatsink lurks the same UVD video-processing engine that takes the computational load off the CPU when processing VC-1- and H.264-encoded media.
The choice of display outputs is entirely up to the add-in board partner - ATI simply integrates the multitude of connections on the GPU. Stressing the low-end nature of the card, Sapphire doesn't provide a DisplayPort connector. We appreciate that logic when value is an absolutely paramount concern.
The bundle is basic, as you would expect, and the usual DVI-to-HDMI connector is conspicuous by its absence.
