PowerColor HD3450 Review

ajmatson - March 30, 2008
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Testing:

To test the PowerColor HD3450, I will place it through a series of graphic intensive benchmarks that will gauge its performance. I will then compare it against another card in its class to see how it compares. I am also going to enable the Hybrid Crossfire feature with an ATI 780G based motherboard that has ATI 3200 integrated graphics to see how much of a performance increase the Crossfire combination will give it. Since Intel boards do not support Hybrid Crossfire with integrated graphics, an AMD Phenom setup will be used for these tests.

Testing Setup:

Processor: Intel Core 2 Duo E8500 333 x 9.5
Motherboard: Gigabyte X38-DS4 w/ BIOS version F2
Memory: OCZ Reaper HPC PC2-8500 5-5-5-18 2 x 2GB
Video Card: PowerColor HD3450 w/ Catalyst Version 8.3
Power Supply: Ultra X2 750w Extreme Edition
Hard Drive: 1 x Seagate 320GB SATA
Opticals: Lite-On 8x DVD+/-RW
O/S: Windows Vista Ultimate Edition

Comparison Test Setup:

Processor: AMD Phenom 9600 "Black Box Edition" (200x11.5)
Motherboard: ECS A780GM-A Version 1.0
Memory: OCZ Reaper HPC PC2-8500 5-5-5-18 2 x 2GB
Video Card #1: PowerColor HD3450 w/ Catalyst 8.3
Video Card #1: Integrated ATI 3200 and a Powercolor HD3450 in CrossfireX w/ Catalyst 8.3
Power Supply: Ultra X2 750w Extreme Edition
Hard Drive: 1 x Seagate 7200.11 750GB SATA w/32MB Cache
Opticals: Lite-On 8x DVD+/-RW
O/S: Windows Vista Ultimate Edition

Comparison Video Card:

ATI HD 3470 256MB

Overclocking:

Overclocked settings:

Processor: Intel Core 2 Duo E8500 @ 3.16GHz (333x9.5)
System Memory: OCZ Reaper HPC PC2-8500 2x2GB @ 1066MHz 5-5-5-18
Video Card: PowerColor HD3450 @ GPU: 641MHz / Memory: 990MHz effective

To overclock the PowerColor HD3450, I used the Catalyst Control Center. I upped the GPU and Memory clockspeeds slightly and tested it for stability. The limit in the control panel was 650MHz for the GPU and 1000MHz for the memory. I was able to push it all the way to 641MHz on the GPU clock speed and almost to the max for the memory at 495MHz, making it 990MHz effectively. That is a great overclock for a midrange card like this. The card idled at 45C which is not bad for a low profile card with only a heatsink.