Sapphire ATI RAEDON HD 3450 graphics card

Backbround, for a coupe of months now I've had the dreaded bluescreen popping up and pointing to one of the nVidia dll's on my HTPC, so the 7300 GS TC card was slated for replacement when convenient. This PC only has 4 80mm fans in it, two for the HDD's and two near the CPU cooler to assist air circulation in the case. The result is that the PC is nearly silent.
I bought the ATI 3450 specifically because of it's passive heatsink, and the Mpeg encode chips built in. It is an easy card to fit inside the case and the driver install went without a hitch; BUT it then took me over an hour to get both the 7" touchscreen and the LCD (connected by HDMI) to both work at the same time and at acceptable resolutions. I had to swap monitor leads around for both sockets until I could get clone mode turned on (in simple mode) and then the resoluton for each display set (in complex mode). Someone should really set up a wizard for this process so that you can do it all in one go.
Connections for this card are one DVI and one VGA and now that it is setup both displays are set at their own native resolution, and more suprisingly both display video from MCE, media player and the couple of old games I have installed. The nVidia could only be set for one display for anything other than MCE, and that could fail from time to time as well. The other pleasant suprise is that the catalyst control center allows you to switch overscan on and off as you please, I can now see the whole desktop on the TV properly instead of missing the edges. All of the meda I've played so far still works just the same as the old card did, but I'll have to admit here my TV is only SD so HD testng hasn't been carried out. Another suprise is that the HD channels don't bog down the PC anymore, I can now watch HDTV direct from the tuner card without the audio going missing.
For what is a base model card in the current lineup I'd strongly reccomend at least considering it, for what s a fairly routine HTPC this one has a lot to like about it and for a good price. While I'd like to be able to comment about it's capabilities on better displays and using HD or Bluray media that is out of reach for now.