PowerColor Go! Green Radeon HD 6450 AX6450 1GBK3-SH Video Card
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Xilocient@NCIX Rating: Review Date: 05/16/12 |
PowerColor Go! Green Radeon HD 6450 AX6450 1GBK3-SH Video Card
Cons:Heat sink will rub up against the expansion card installed next to it.
Pros:Silent, Perfect card for a low power HTPC |
Adrian_F@NCIX Rating: Review Date: 09/24/11 |
PowerColor Go! Green Radeon HD 6450 AX6450 1GBK3-SH Video Card
Cons:not for hardcore gamers
Pros:inexpensive, good quality image, great for HTPC use (and bistreaming HD audio sources) Comment:
If you've come here, you already know what you're looking for so I'll say this is a great videocard for those building HTPCs.Even though my most recent HTPC build in February used an i3-540 (Clarkdale CPU), on-board Intel solutions have an issue with proper 24fps playback (essentially, you get a slight "stutter" ever 40 seconds or so). As I work in the industry, I could see this without fail and it became increasingly annoying resulting in this purchase.Installation was pretty straight-forward. I uninstalled the old Intel Drivers, went into the BIOS and disabled onboard video, saved my settings and powered down. Installed the card, powered up, and installed the most recent drivers from Powercolor's site (even though AMD has more recent ones, I'd rather use the ones that the manufacturer recommends). Had to install the Realtek HDMI driver to ensure HDMI bitstreaming worked but once I did this, everything works like a charm. The temperature in my case has not increased as a result of this card (even when watching 1080p content with full HD audio). There is also no noise from the card as it's fanless. What I have noticed is that when there is no audio playback, an increased "hiss" can be heard via HDMI -- when audio is playing back (even an empty audio file), this "hiss" is gone. I find the display quality on this card BETTER than the on-board solution and the "stutter" is now gone. Purchased for around $32 all-in (after rebate) and would do it again in a heartbeat. |
While this card isn't particularly powerful, it is superior to the integrated GPUs in all modern processors. Being passively cooled limits the card's performance, but also keeps the computer silent.