Best suited: HD2600XT or HD3450

[vbmds]

I'm after some advice on which graphics card is the better card for my HTPC. I'm looking to get a card that is quiet and provides an HDMI port.

The machine I am currently building will be solely used to play CD/DVD disks and hard disk based movies (xvid mostly) as well as mp3/ogg music.

The machine will have 2GB RAM (DDR2-800) and be running a Althlon64 X2 4000+ CPU.

The intention is to run XPMC, although I also have VistaMC which I may load to compare performace with XPMC, the graphics card therefore needs to be able to handle both OS.

Thoughts, advice...

[Redwight]

The reviews I've come across all say the MPEG chipset is the same so personally I'd lean towards whichever I can get inorder of preference first; silent andthen price. The 3 series might have a bit more grunt, and quite possibly use less power as well. So making a clear choice would be a matter of what matters most to you.

[vbmds]

Yeah well that seems to be the problem, lots of 'might' but nothing one way or the other to help make a discison - is the newer 3450 more powerful/efficient/whatever, than the older 2600XT.

I can get both cards for about the same price, silent and with HDMI ... so my choice comes down to which is the better performer in a HTPC environment for type of tasks I outlined in the 1st post; given the choice of both. All the reviews I have found are always 1 or the other VS nvidia card(s). I've not managed to find a comparison of the 2 generations of HD cards.

[Redwight]

3450 specs:

ATI RADEON™ HD 3450




181 million transistors on 55nm fabrication process
PCI Express 2.0 x16 bus interface
64-bit DDR2/GDDR3 memory interface
Microsoft® DirectX® 10.1 support
Shader Model 4.1
32-bit floating point texture filtering
Indexed cube map arrays
Independent blend modes per render target
Pixel coverage sample masking
Read/write multi-sample surfaces with shaders
Gather4 texture fetching
Unified Superscalar Shader Architecture
40 stream processing units
Dynamic load balancing and resource allocation for vertex, geometry, and pixel shaders
Common instruction set and texture unit access supported for all types of shaders
Dedicated branch execution units and texture address processors
128-bit floating point precision for all operations
Command processor for reduced CPU overhead
Shader instruction and constant caches
Up to 16 texture fetches per clock cycle
Up to 128 textures per pixel
Fully associative vertex/texture cache design
DXTC and 3Dc+ texture compression
High resolution texture support (up to 8192 x 8192)
Fully associative texture & Z/stencil cache designs
Early Z test, Re-Z, Z Range optimization, and Fast Z Clear
Lossless Z & stencil compression
8 render targets (MRTs) with anti-aliasing support
Physics processing support
Dynamic Geometry Acceleration
Programmable tessellation unit
Accelerated geometry shader path for geometry amplification
Memory read/write cache for improved stream output performance
Anti-aliasing features
Multi sample anti aliasing (2 or 4 samples per pixel)
Custom Filter Anti-Aliasing (CFAA) for improved quality
Adaptive super-sampling and multi-sampling
Temporal anti-aliasing
Gamma correct
Super AA (ATI CrossFire™ configurations only)
All anti-aliasing features compatible with HDR rendering
Texture filtering features
2x/4x/8x/16x high quality adaptive anisotropic filtering modes (up to 128 taps per pixel)
128-bit floating point HDR texture filtering
Bicubic filtering
sRGB filtering (gamma/degamma)
Percentage Closer Filtering (PCF)
Depth & stencil texture (DST) format support
Shared exponent HDR (RGBE 9:9:9:5) texture format support
OpenGL 2.0 support
ATI Avivo™ HD Video and Display Platform
Dedicated unified video decoder (UVD) for H.264/AVC and VC-1 video formats
High definition (HD) playback of both Blu-ray and HD DVD formats
Hardware MPEG-1, MPEG-2, and DivX video decode acceleration
Motion compensation and IDCT
ATI Avivo Video Post Processor
Color space conversion
Chroma subsampling format conversion
Horizontal and vertical scaling
Gamma correction
Advanced vector adaptive per-pixel de-interlacing
De-blocking and noise reduction filtering
Detail enhancement
Inverse telecine (2:2 and 3:2 pull-down correction)
Bad edit correction
Two independent display controllers
Drive two displays simultaneously with independent resolutions, refresh rates, color controls and video overlays for each display
Full 30-bit display processing
Programmable piecewise linear gamma correction, color correction, and color space conversion
Spatial/temporal dithering provides 30-bit color quality on 24-bit and 18-bit displays
High quality pre- and post-scaling engines, with underscan support for all display outputs
Content-adaptive de-flicker filtering for interlaced displays
Fast, glitch-free mode switching
Hardware cursor
Two integrated DVI display outputs
Primary supports 18-, 24-, and 30-bit digital displays at all resolutions up to 1920x1200 (single-link DVI) or 2560x1600 (dual-link DVI)1
Secondary supports 18-, 24-, and 30-bit digital displays at all resolutions up to 1920x1200 (single-link DVI only)1
Each includes HDCP encoder with on-chip key storage for maximum resolution playback of protected content2
Two integrated DisplayPort™ outputs
Supports 24- and 30-bit displays at all resolutions up to 2560x16001
1, 2, or 4 lanes per output, with data rate up to 2.7 Gbps per lane
Two integrated 400 MHz 30-bit RAMDACs
Each supports analog displays connected by VGA at all resolutions up to 2048x15361
HDMI output support
Supports all display resolutions up to 1920x10801
Integrated HD audio controller with up to 2 channel 48 kHz stereo or multichannel(5.1) AC3 enabling a plug-and-play cable-less audio solution
Integrated AMD Xilleon™ HDTV encoder
Provides high quality analog TV output (component/S-video/composite)
Supports SDTV and HDTV resolutions
Underscan and overscan compensation
MPEG-2, MPEG-4, DivX, WMV9, VC-1, and H.264/AVC encoding and transcoding
Seamless integration of pixel shaders with video in real time
VGA mode support on all display outputs
ATI PowerPlay™
Advanced power management technology for optimal performance and power savings
Performance-on-Demand
Constantly monitors GPU activity, dynamically adjusting clocks and voltage based on user scenario
Clock and memory speed throttling
Voltage switching
Dynamic clock gating
Central thermal management – on-chip sensor monitors GPU temperature and triggers thermal actions as required
ATI CrossFireX™ Multi-GPU Technology
Scale up rendering performance and image quality with two GPUs
Integrated compositing engine
High performance bridge interconnect1
Some custom resolutions require user configuration
Playing HDCP content requires additional HDCP ready components, including but not limited to an HDCP ready monitor, Blu-ray or HD DVD disc drive, multimedia application and computer operating system
Dual channel interconnect is not required for ATI CrossFire, and may not be included in all product configurations
System Requirements

PCI Express® based PC is required with one X16 lane graphics slot available on the motherboard
300 Watt or greater power supply recommended
Certified power supplies are recommended. Refer to http://ati.amd.com/certifiedPSU for a list of Certified products
1GB of system memory
Installation software requires CD-ROM drive
DVD playback requires DVD drive
Blu-ray™ / HD DVD playback requires Blu-ray / HD DVD drive and playback software
For a complete ATI CrossFireX™ system, a second ATI Radeon™ HD 3400 Series graphics card, an ATI CrossFireX Ready motherboard and one ATI CrossFire Bridge Interconnect cable is required

2600XT specs:

ATI RADEON™ HD 2600XT




390 million transistors on 65nm fabrication process
128-bit DDR2/GDDR3/GDDR4 memory interface
Ring Bus Memory Controller
Fully distributed design with 256-bit internal ring bus for memory reads and writes
Unified Superscalar Shader Architecture
120 stream processing units
Dynamic load balancing and resource allocation for vertex, geometry, and pixel shaders
Common instruction set and texture unit access supported for all types of shaders
Dedicated branch execution units and texture address processors
128-bit floating point precision for all operations
Command processor for reduced CPU overhead
Shader instruction and constant caches
Up to 40 texture fetches per clock cycle
Up to 128 textures per pixel
Fully associative multi-level texture cache design
DXTC and 3Dc+ texture compression
High resolution texture support (up to 8192 x 8192)
Fully associative texture Z/stencil cache designs
Double-sided hierarchical Z/stencil buffer
Early Z test, Re-Z, Z Range optimization, and Fast Z Clear
Lossless Z & stencil compression (up to 128:1)
Lossless color compression (up to 8:1)
8 render targets (MRTs) with anti-aliasing support
Physics processing support
Full support for Microsoft® DirectX® 10.0
Shader Model 4.0
Geometry Shaders
Stream Output
Integer and Bitwise Operations
Alpha to Coverage
Constant Buffers
State Objects
Texture Arrays
Dynamic Geometry Acceleration
High performance vertex cache
Programmable tessellation unit
Accelerated geometry shader path for geometry amplification
Memory read/write cache for improved stream output performance
Anti-aliasing features
Multi-sample anti-aliasing (up to 8 samples per pixel)
Up to 24x Custom Filter Anti-Aliasing (CFAA) for improved quality
Adaptive super-sampling and multi-sampling
Temporal anti-aliasing
Gamma correct
Super AA (CrossFire configurations only)
All anti-aliasing features compatible with HDR rendering
Texture filtering features
2x/4x/8x/16x high quality adaptive anisotropic filtering modes (up to 128 taps per pixel)
128-bit floating point HDR texture filtering
Bicubic filtering
sRGB filtering (gamma/degamma)
Percentage Closer Filtering (PCF)
Depth & stencil texture (DST) format support
Shared exponent HDR (RGBE 9:9:9:5) texture format support
CrossFire™ Multi-GPU Technology
Scale up rendering performance and image quality with 2 or more GPUs
Integrated compositing engine
High performance dual channel interconnect
ATI Avivo™ HD Video and Display Platform
Dedicated unified video decoder (UVD) for H.264/AVC and VC-1 video formats
High definition (HD) playback of both Blu-ray and HD DVD formats
Hardware MPEG-1, MPEG-2, MPEG-4/DivX video decode acceleration
Motion compensation and iDCT (inverse discrete cosine transform)
Avivo Video Post Processor
Color space conversion
Chroma subsampling format conversion
Horizontal and vertical scaling
Gamma correction
High Quality Video Post Processing
Advanced vector adaptive per-pixel de-interlacing
De-blocking and noise reduction filtering
Detail enhancement
Inverse telecine (2:2 and 3:2 pull-down correction)
Bad edit correction
Two independent display controllers
Drive two displays simultaneously with independent resolutions, refresh rates, color controls and video overlays for each display
Full 30-bit display processing
Programmable piecewise linear gamma correction, color correction, and color space conversion
Spatial/temporal dithering provides 30-bit color quality on 24-bit and 18-bit displays
High quality pre- and post-scaling engines, with underscan support for all display outputs
Content-adaptive de-flicker filtering for interlaced displays
Fast, glitch-free mode switching
Hardware cursor
Two integrated dual-link DVI display outputs
Each supports 18-, 24-, and 30-bit digital displays at all resolutions up to 1920x1200 (single-link DVI) or 2560x1600 (dual-link DVI)1
Each includes a dual-link HDCP encoder with on-chip key storage for high resolution playback of protected content2
Two integrated 400 MHz 30-bit RAMDACs
Each supports analog displays connected by VGA at all resolutions up to 2048x15361
HDMI output support
Supports all display resolutions up to 1920x10801
Integrated HD audio controller with multi-channel (5.1) AC3 support, enabling a plug-and-play cable-less audio solution
Integrated AMD Xilleon™ HDTV encoder
Provides high quality analog TV output (component/S-video/composite)
Supports SDTV and HDTV resolutions
Underscan and overscan compensation
MPEG-2, MPEG-4, DivX, WMV9, VC-1, and H.264/AVC encoding and transcoding
Seamless integration of pixel shaders with video in real time
VGA mode support on all display outputs
PCI Express x16 bus interface
OpenGL 2.0 support
1 Some custom resolutions require user configuration
2 HDCP support for playback of protected content requires connection to a HDCP capable display

The2600 has more transistors, more shaders ETC which migh matter for gaming. The 3450 has the thinner die used which would mean less power consumption but also doesn't really lookasif it's carrying as big a stick. For pue C use I'd go the 3450, if you want some gaming the picture gets lots less clear. Most graphics cards on the maket can do HTPC use but either would allow you to offload a fair bit of graphics processing when set up. Both sets of information ripped straight off the saphire site, both say DX 10 and Vista is supported, but I noticed power specs are absent for the 2600XT. I'd have to say though it's highly likely that due to better manufacture, less transistors, and a few other things that for HTPC only use I'd probably lean towards the 3450 or maybe a little higher in that series.

I have a 2900XT in my gaming rig and when it's being pushed I can feel the heat it gives off, from memory thought the 2900 was about 250W power needed for the card and the 2600 was around 125W which is quite a big difference. Without a serious review to look up I can't tell how much the 3450 uses so I'll keep loking for a bit.

[Redwight]

OK, after a bit of digging this review on Anadtech suggest the 3600 cards only use 75W and fails to specify how low the 3450 gets.

It does seem however that no-ones gotten their grubby little hands on one to benchmark or review it in the flesh.

[Akuma]

Originally Posted by Redwight

OK, after a bit of digging this review on Anadtech suggest the 3600 cards only use 75W and fails to specify how low the 3450 gets.

The 3450 doesn't require external power so it must be using less than 75w, since that's the max the mobo can provide.

[vbmds]

Thanks Redwight for all the information.

Looks like the 3450 might be the way to go then as its going into a HTPC with no likeihood of gaming happening on it, and if it dosn't need extra power than thats also an additional bonus - even with using a 420W PSU.

If I want to game, I'll just use my laptop - its got Go7600 with 256MB dedicated RAM, so its more than adequate for the gaming I do, and it looks just as good on the 42" LCD TV

[Redwight]

I'd have to say on reflection too that this probably isn't apples for apples, the 3450 looks like the replacement for the 2400 pro; the 3470 for the 2400XT etc, up to the 3870 being the replacement line for my 2900XT. It's just a thought however.

And being such a new card expect a few bugs in the drivers for a while, the january catalyst drivers are the most stable I've had so far for my 2900.

[vbmds]

Agreed, I also assume the 3450 is the replacement for the 2400, however my line of questioning is more along the lines of - Is the new generation base card (3450) more capable (for a lack of a better way to phrase this) than the mid/top old generation card (2600)

[Redwight]

It looks like your biggest area of gain with the newer card is heat and power consumption. The specs for the 2400 XT suggest in all other regards they're close. once again the extra grunt of the 2600 is far more relavant to gaming than HTPC use.